Back

CROCCP2 acts as a human-specific modifier of cilia dynamics and mTOR signalling to promote expansion of cortical progenitors.

van Heurck, R.; Wojno, M.; Suzuki, I.; Velez, F.; Bonnefont, J.; Erkol, E.; Nguyen, D. T.; Herpoel, A.; Bilheu, A.; Ledent, C.; Vanderhaeghen, P.

2020-06-18 neuroscience
10.1101/2020.06.17.142976 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The primary cilum is a central component of signalling during neural development, from regional patterning to neuronal differentiation. Here we focus on CROCCP2, a hominid-specific gene duplicate from CROCC (Ciliary Rootlet Coiled Coil), also known as rootletin, that encodes the major protein component of the ciliary rootlet. We find that CROCCP2 is highly expressed in the human fetal brain and not in other primate species. CROCCP2 gain of function in the mouse embryonic cortex results in decreased ciliogenesis, increased mTOR signalling, and increased cell size of radial glial cells, leading to increased generation of intermediate/basal progenitors and increased neuronal output. CROCCP2 impacts cilia dynamics and neurogenesis by inhibition of the IFT20 ciliary trafficking protein. Our data identify a human-specific protein that drives cortical basal progenitor expansion through modulation of ciliary dynamics.

Matching journals

The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.