Reproductive fitness in many animals relies upon a tight balance between the number of cells that proliferate in the germ line and the number of cells that enter meiosis and differentiate as gametes. In the Caenorhabditis elegans germ line, the GLP-1/Notch signaling pathway controls this balance between proliferation and meiotic entry. Here we describe the identification of the proteasome as an...

Segregation of the germ line from the soma is an essential event for transmission of genetic information across generations in all sexually reproducing animals. Although some well-studied systems such as Drosophila and Xenopus usematernally inherited germ determinants to specify germ cells, most animals, including mice, appear to utilize zygotic inductive cell signals to specify germ cells duri...

The epigenetic regulation of gene expression by the covalent modification of histones is a fundamental mechanism required for the proper differentiation of germ line cells during development. Trimethylation of histone 3 lysine 9 (H3K9me3) leads to chromatin silencing and the formation of heterochromatin by recruitment of heterochromatin protein 1 (HP1). dSETDB1/Eggless (Egg), the ortholog of th...

A common feature of development in most vertebrate models is the early segregation of the germ line from the soma. For example, in Xenopus and zebrafish embryos primordial germ cells (PGCs) are specified by germ plasm that is inherited from the egg; in mice,Blimp1 expression in the epiblast mediates the commitment of cells to the germ line. How these disparate mechanisms of PGC specification ev...

Mitochondria play a crucial role in the development and function of germ cells. Mitochondria contain a maternally inherited genome that should be transmitted to offspring without reactive oxygen species-induced damage during germ line development. Germ cells are also involved in the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) bottleneck; thus, the appropriate regulation of mtDNA in these cells is very important ...

Early in development, a part of the embryo is set aside to become the germ cell lineage that will ultimately differentiate to form sperm and eggs and transmit genetic information to the next generation. Men with deletions encompassing the Y-chromosome DAZ genes have few or no germ cells but are otherwise healthy, indicating they harbor specific defects in formation or maintenance of germ cells....

W hile stock markets and economies are smoldering all over the world, stem cell science is on fire. The promise of curing many untreatable forms of human male infertility is now one small step closer based on a recent paper in Cell. In this work, scientists from Kyoto University in Japan created mature, fertile sperm from embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells by grabbing the primitive ge...