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Functional analysis of the piRNA pathway in golden hamsters
Loubalová, Zuzana ; Svoboda, Petr (advisor) ; Haase, Astrid D. (referee) ; Ketting, René (referee)
The piRNA pathway is a highly conserved mechanism that regulates gene and retrotransposon expression at transcriptional and post-transcriptional levels. Defects in the piRNA pathway impair germ cell development in animals from invertebrates to mammals. In mammals, the current knowledge of the piRNA pathway has been mainly built from mouse model studies. The mouse model suggests that the piRNA pathway is dispensable for mammalian female germline. However, mouse differs from other mammals in several important aspects. It lacks PIWIL3, one of four PIWI proteins found in other mammals, and has a highly active RNA interference in mouse oocytes, which points towards a unique combination of small RNA pathways in the mouse female germline. These specific modifications of small RNA pathways in mice could obscure the biological significance of the mammalian piRNA pathway. My Ph.D. project aimed at investigating the importance of the piRNA pathway in mammals and analyzing conserved and derived aspects of this pathway. As golden hamsters encode all mammalian PIWI proteins and likely lack highly active RNA interference in oocytes, they represent mammalian small RNA pathways closer than mice. Therefore, we generated a golden hamster knock-out of MOV10L1 helicase, an essential factor in piRNA biogenesis. We...
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