UC San Diego

Nonsense-mediated decay (NMD) is an RNA decay pathway that has been shown to be involved in eukaryotic gene regulation. NMD has yet to be thoroughly studied in vivo since the knockout of factors involved in NMD lead to embryonic lethality. By using transgenic mice that express a dominant-negative form of UPF1 (dnUPF1) as NMD-knockdown mouse model, we attempt to study the role of NMD in embryogenesis and spermatogenesis. I identified that dnUPF1 transgenic mice may not serve as the best model to study embryogenesis due to doxycycline toxicity. Consistent with prior literature, we also discovered that male germ cells preferentially respond to the long 3’ UTR NMD-inducing feature as long 3’ UTR mRNA transcripts are NMD targets in male germ cells. These results suggest the prominence of a male germ cell specific NMD pathway.