A microRNA controlling left/right neuronal asymmetry in Caenorhabditis elegans
- 14 December 2003
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Springer Science and Business Media LLC in Nature
- Vol. 426 (6968), 845-849
- https://doi.org/10.1038/nature02255
Abstract
How left/right functional asymmetry is layered on top of an anatomically symmetrical nervous system is poorly understood. In the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, two morphologically bilateral taste receptor neurons, ASE left (ASEL) and ASE right (ASER), display a left/right asymmetrical expression pattern of putative chemoreceptor genes that correlates with a diversification of chemosensory specificities1,2. Here we show that a previously undefined microRNA termed lsy-6 controls this neuronal left/right asymmetry of chemosensory receptor expression. lsy-6 mutants that we retrieved from a genetic screen for defects in neuronal left/right asymmetry display a loss of the ASEL-specific chemoreceptor expression profile with a concomitant gain of the ASER-specific profile. A lsy-6 reporter gene construct is expressed in less than ten neurons including ASEL, but not ASER. lsy-6 exerts its effects on ASEL through repression of cog-1, an Nkx-type homeobox gene, which contains a lsy-6 complementary site in its 3′ untranslated region and that has been shown to control ASE-specific chemoreceptor expression profiles3. lsy-6 is the first microRNA to our knowledge with a role in neuronal patterning, providing new insights into left/right axis formation.This publication has 20 references indexed in Scilit:
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