To investigate whether a specific isotype of tubulin is involved in flagellar motility, we have developed and screened a panel of monoclonal antibodies (mAb) generated against sea urchin sperm axonemal proteins. Antibodies were selected for their ability to block the motility of permeabilized sperm models. The antitubulin mAb B3 completely inhibited, at low concentrations, the flagellar motilit...

Long and short repetitive sequences of sea urchin DNA were prepared by reassociation of 2000 nucleotide long fragments to Cot 4 and digestion with the single strand specific nuclease S1. The S1 resistant duplexes were separated into long repetitive and short repetitive fractions on Agarose A50. The extent of shared sequences was studied by reassociating a labeled preparation of short repetitive...

Spinochromes are principally known to be involved in sea urchin pigmentation as well as for their potentially interesting pharmacological properties. To assess their biological role in sea urchin physiology, experiments are undertaken on crude extracts from four species and on four isolated spinochromes in order to test their antibacterial, antioxidant, inflammatory and cytotoxic activities. Fi...

Anterior signaling centers help specify and pattern the early anterior neuroectoderm (ANE) in many deuterostomes. In sea urchin the ANE is restricted to the anterior of the late blastula stage embryo, where it forms a simple neural territory comprising several types of neurons as well as the apical tuft. Here, we show that during early development, the sea urchin ANE territory separates into in...

bicaudal-C (bicC) mRNA encodes a protein containing RNA-binding domains that is reported to be maternally present with deflection in the oocytes/eggs of some species. The translated protein plays a critical role in the regulation of cell fate specification along the body axis during early embryogenesis in flies and frogs. However, it is unclear how it functions in eggs in which bicC mRNA is uni...

The question of whether proteins necessary for cleavage are already present in unfertilized eggs or whether they are synthesized after fertilization has interested embryologists for a number of years. In 1959, Went (11) published immunological evidence for the presence in unfertilized sea urchin eggs of proteins also associated with partially purified mitotic apparatuses. Recently, Borisy and T...

We used in vitro translocation and cosedimentation assays to study the microtubule binding properties of sea urchin sperm outer arm dynein and its beta/IC1 subunit. Microtubules glided on glass-absorbed sea urchin dynein for a period of time directly proportional to the initial MgATP2- concentration and then detached when 70-95% of the MgATP2- was hydrolyzed. Detachment resulted from MgATP2- de...

Unfertilized sea urchin eggs that are arrested at G1 phase after completion of meiosis contain a highly phosphorylated mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase (MAPK), the ERK-like protein (ERK-LP). Several data including our previous results show that ERK-LP is inactivated after fertilization, which agrees with results obtained in other species including Xenopus, starfish and mammals. The questi...

Habitat structure plays an important mediating role in predator-prey interactions. However the effects are strongly dependent on regional predator pools, which can drive predation risk in habitats with very similar structure in opposite directions. In the Mediterranean Sea predation on juvenile sea urchins is commonly known to be regulated by seagrass structure. In this study we test whether th...