The asymmetry of mouth morphology, in which the mouth opens either leftward or rightward, is a unique example of antisymmetry that is widely found in fishes, such as Tanganyikan scale-eating cichlids, herbivorous cichlids, and the Japanese freshwater goby. This dimorphism is thought to be heritable in a Mendelian manner similar to that of the dominance of the lefty allele over righty, with homo...

Upon salinity challenge, the Na(+)-K(+)-ATPase (NKA) of fish kidney plays a crucial role in maintaining ion and water balance. Moreover, the FXYD protein family was found to be a regulator of NKA. Our preliminary results revealed that fxyd12 was highly expressed in the kidneys of the two closely related euryhaline medaka species (Oryzias dancena and O. latipes) from different natural habitats (...

Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated (Cas) system-based RNA-guided endonuclease (RGEN) has recently emerged as a simple and efficient tool for targeted genome editing. In this study, we showed successful targeted mutagenesis using RGENs in medaka, Oryzias latipes. Somatic and heritable mutations were induced with high efficiency at the targeted ge...

Sex is pivotal for reproduction, healthcare and evolution. In the fish medaka, the Y-chromosomal dmy (also dmrt1bY) serves the sex determiner, which activates dmrt1 for male sex maintenance. However, how dmy makes the male decision via initiating testicular differentiation has remained unknown. Here we report that autosomal gsdf serves a male sex initiator. Gene addition and deletion revealed t...

Three sex-determining (SD) genes, SRY (mammals), Dmy (medaka), and DM-W (Xenopus laevis), have been identified to date in vertebrates. However, how and why a new sex-determining gene appears remains unknown, as do the switching mechanisms of the master sex-determining gene. Here, we used positional cloning to search for the sex-determining gene in Oryzias luzonensis and found that GsdfY (gonada...

Transformer-2 (Tra2), an RNA-binding protein, is an important regulator in Drosophila sex determination. In vertebrates, however, the role of Tra2 homologues is not known. We identified two teleost homologues of Tra2, which we named Tra2a and Tra2b, in medaka (Oryzias latipes). Furthermore, we demonstrated that both Tra2 mRNAs were predominantly expressed in germ cells of both sexes before the ...

In the initial phase of development of fish embryos, a prominent and critical event is the midblastula transition (MBT). Before MBT cell cycle is rapid, highly synchronous and zygotic gene transcription is turned off. Only during MBT the cell cycle desynchronizes and transcription is activated. Multiple mechanisms, primarily the nucleocytoplasmic ratio, are supposed to control MBT activation. U...