Murray State Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

My overarching goal was to elucidate the role of Tudor (Tud) protein in the Drosophila brain. Tud is an evolutionarily conserved molecular scaffold, containing 11 Tud domains which bind to symmetrically dimethylated arginine (sDMA) residues in a variety of proteins. Tud is an essential component of embryonic ribonucleoprotein complexes (RNPs) called germ granules that contain RNAs and proteins crucial to the differentiation and maintenance of germ cells, the specialized class of stem cells that ultimately give rise to the next generation of organism. In the absence of Tud, there is a complete abolishment of germ cells highlighting its important role in the germline. However, Tud is also expressed in the central nervous system where its role is unknown. I used next generation sequencing (NGS) to determine how Tud affects the brain transcriptome as well as the genome editing technique Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) to decipher Tud cellular localization. Altogether, the research presented here sheds light on the molecular function of Tud in the brain that was previously unknown.

Year manuscript completed

2021

Year degree awarded

2021

Author's Keywords

Tudor, brain, glial granule, germ granule, piRNA

Thesis Advisor

Alexey Arkov

Committee Chair

Alexey Arkov

Committee Member

Dena Weinberger

Committee Member

Christopher Lennon

Committee Member

Ricky Cox

Committee Member

Gary Zeruth

Document Type

Thesis

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