Abstract
Although parthenogenesis is widespread in nature and known to have close relationships with bisexuality, the transitional mechanism is poorly understood. Artemia is an ideal model to address this issue because bisexuality and “contagious” obligate parthenogenesis independently exist in its congeneric members. In the present study, we first performed chromosome spreading and immunofluorescence to compare meiotic processes of Artemia adopting two distinct reproductive ways. The results showed that, unlike conventional meiosis in bisexual Artemia, meiosis II in parthenogenic Artemia is entirely absent and anaphase I is followed by a single mitosis-like equational division. Interspecific comparative transcriptomics showed that two central molecules in homologous recombination (HR), Dmc1 and Rad51, exhibited significantly higher expression in bisexual versus parthenogenetic Artemia. qRT-PCR indicated that the expression of both genes peaked at the early oogenesis and gradually decreased afterward. Knocking-down by RNAi of Dmc1 in unfertilized females of bisexual Artemia resulted in a severe deficiency of homologous chromosome pairing and produced univalents at the middle oogenesis stage, which was similar to that of parthenogenic Artemia, while in contrast, silencing Rad51 led to no significant chromosome morphological change. Our results indicated that Dmc1 is vital for HR in bisexual Artemia, and the deficiency of Dmc1 may be correlated with or even possibly one of core factors in the transition from bisexuality to parthenogenesis.
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Data availability
All data are included in this manuscript and in its supplementary materials, or submitted to public databases. The RNA-seq data are available in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive (SRA) database (SUB12209975). The nucleotide sequences of Dmc1 and Rad51 have been deposited in the GenBank/DDBJ/EMBL databases (OP773875 and OP773876).
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This work was supported by the National Key R & D Program of China Grant 2018YFD0900603, Key Scientific and Technological Grant of Zhejiang for Breeding New Agricultural Varieties 2021C02069-4, National Natural Science Foundation of China Grant 32172945, and Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province Grant LY23C040003.
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Wei-Jun Yang, Jin-Shu Yang, and Lian-Ying Xu conceived and designed the research. Lian-Ying Xu, Wen-Tao Wu, Ning Bi, Zhi-Jun Yan, and Fan Yang performed the experiments. Lian-Ying Xu and Jin-Shu Yang analyzed the experiment data. Jin-Shu Yang and Lian-Ying Xu wrote the paper. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Xu, LY., Wu, WT., Bi, N. et al. A cytological revisit on parthenogenetic Artemia and the deficiency of a meiosis-specific recombinase DMC1 in the possible transition from bisexuality to parthenogenesis. Chromosoma 132, 89–103 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00412-023-00790-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00412-023-00790-x