Abstract
Protein phosphatase 6 (PP6) is a member of the PP2A-like subfamily, which plays a critical role in many fundamental cellular processes. We recently reported that PP6 is essential for female fertility. Here, we report that PP6 is involved in meiotic recombination and that germ cell-specific deletion of PP6 by Stra8-Cre causes defective spermatogenesis. The PP6-deficient spermatocytes were arrested at the pachytene stage and defects in DSB repair and crossover formation were observed, indicating that PP6 facilitated meiotic double-stranded breaks (DSB) repair. Further investigations revealed that depletion of PP6 in the germ cells affected chromatin relaxation, which was dependent on MAPK pathway activity, consequently preventing programmed DSB repair factors from being recruited to proper positions on the chromatin. Taken together, our results demonstrate that PP6 has an important role in meiotic recombination and male fertility.
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18 June 2020
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41418-020-0574-4
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Acknowledgements
We appreciate and acknowledge Shiwen Li and Xili Zhu for their technical assistance. We thank all members of the Sun laboratories for their help and discussion. We thank Drs Xingzhi Xu and Xiao Yang for providing the Ppp6cF/F mice. We thank Xiaoqing Nie for the culture of 293T-cells. This study was supported by the National R&D Program of China (2018YFA0107701, 2016YFC1000600), NSFC (31530049, 31701299) and the Youth Innovation Promotion Association (CAS 2017114).
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Lei, WL., Han, F., Hu, MW. et al. Protein phosphatase 6 is a key factor regulating spermatogenesis. Cell Death Differ 27, 1952–1964 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41418-019-0472-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41418-019-0472-9
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