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Ubiquitin tag for sperm mitochondria

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Abstract

Like other mammals, humans inherit mitochondria from the mother only, even though the sperm contributes nearly one hundred mitochondria to the fertilized egg. In support of the idea that this strictly maternal inheritance of mitochondrial DNA arises from the selective destruction of sperm mitochondria1,2, we show here that sperm mitochondria inside fertilized cow and monkey eggs are tagged by the recycling marker protein ubiquitin3. This imprint is a death sentence that is written during spermatogenesis and executed after the sperm mitochondria encounter the egg's cytoplasmic destruction machinery.

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Figure 1: Ubiquitination of sperm mitochondria in mammalian zygotes and embryos.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Oregon Regional Primate Research Center and Departments of Cell-Developmental Biology and Obstetrics-Gynecology, Oregon Health Sciences University, 505 NW 185th Avenue, Beaverton, 97006, Oregon, USA

    Peter Sutovsky, Tanja Dominko, Calvin Simerly & Gerald Schatten

  2. International Center for Cancer Research and Developmental Biology, Santiago, Chile

    Ricardo D. Moreno

  3. Department of Zoology, Center for Neuroscience, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

    João Ramalho-Santos

Authors
  1. Peter Sutovsky
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  2. Ricardo D. Moreno
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  3. João Ramalho-Santos
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  4. Tanja Dominko
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  5. Calvin Simerly
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  6. Gerald Schatten
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gerald Schatten.

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Sutovsky, P., Moreno, R., Ramalho-Santos, J. et al. Ubiquitin tag for sperm mitochondria. Nature 402, 371–372 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/46466

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