Journal of Biological Chemistry
Volume 286, Issue 8, 25 February 2011, Pages 6760-6768
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Developmental Biology
A Transmembrane Protein EIG121L Is Required for Epidermal Differentiation during Early Embryonic Development*

https://doi.org/10.1074/jbc.M110.177907Get rights and content
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Epidermal differentiation in the ventral ectoderm of Xenopus embryos is regulated by the bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) pathway. However, it remains unclear how the BMP pathway is activated and induces the epidermal fate in the ventral ectoderm. Here, we identify a novel player in the BMP pathway that is required for epidermal differentiation during Xenopus early embryonic development. We show that Xenopus EIG121L (xEIG121L) protein, an evolutionarily conserved transmembrane protein, is expressed in the ventral ectoderm at the gastrula and neurula stages. Almost complete knockdown of xEIG121L protein with antisense morpholino oligonucleotides in early Xenopus embryos results in severe developmental defects, including the inhibition of epidermal differentiation and the induction of neural genes. Remarkably, our analysis shows that BMP/Smad1 signaling is severely suppressed in the xEIG121L knockdown ectoderm. Moreover, immunoprecipitation and immunostaining experiments suggest that xEIG121L protein physically interacts, and co-localizes, with BMP receptors. Thus, our results identify a novel regulator of the BMP pathway that has a positive role in BMP signaling and plays an essential role in epidermal differentiation during early embryonic development.

Bone Morphogenetic Protein (BMP)
Development
Embryo
Signal Transduction
Xenopus

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The nucleotide sequence(s) reported in this paper has been submitted to the DDBJ/GenBankTM/EBI Data Bank with accession number(s) AB566126.

*

This work was supported by grants from the Kao Foundation for Arts and Sciences (to M. K.) and the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan (to E. N. and M. K.).

The on-line version of this article (available at http://www.jbc.org) contains supplemental Fig. S1.

1

A research fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.