Marine mammals trace anthropogenic structures at sea

What happens when you get rid of P granules? Mutants that fail to partition P granules to the P lineage are viable and fertile, suggesting that P granules are not essential to distinguish soma from germline in embryos. Mutations in individual P-granule components lead to sterility at high temperature and impaired translational control of at least some mRNAs. What happens when germ cells lack all P granules, however, has been hard to determine due to functional redundancy among P-granule components. A recent study found that simultaneous depletion of PGL-1, PGL3, GLH-1 and GLH-4 gives rise to germ cells that occasionally express somatic markers and form neurite-like extensions. An attractive possibility is that P granules preserve the totipotency of the germline by silencing somatic differentiation programs until fertilization.