time course of degradation and deadenylation of maternal c-mos and cyclin a2 mrna during early development of one-cell embryo in mouse

early in the development of many animals, before transcription begins, any change in the pattern of protein synthesis is attributed to a change in the translational activity or stability of mrna in the egg and early embryo. as a result, translational control is critical for a variety of developmental decisions, including oocyte maturation and initiation of preimplantation development. in this study, using real-time rt-pcr method, we defined the time course of degradation and deadenylation of an oocyte specific gene (c-mos) more precisely and a gene that is re-synthesized after zga (cyclin a2). our data indicate that oocyte-specific transcript, c-mos, degrades rapidly while cyclin a2 mrna does not and the deadenylation of c-mos mrna precedes the process of degradation. our findings suggest that time-dependent elimination of different maternal mrna is a way for regulation of translation in early development of mouse embryos