Germ cell, genes

The somatic cell gene replacement described above would obviously not be passed on to offspring. Other strategies to alter germ cell lines have been devised but have been tested only in experimental animals. A certain... 

B-raf, a member of the raf gene family of serine/threonine kinases, is expressed as two major transcripts of 4.0 kb and 2.6 kb in the mouse testis (Wadewitz et al., 1993). B-raf expression is limited to the germ cells and is particularly abundant in early spermatids. Northern hybridization analysis revealed that the two B-ra/transcripts are expressed in a stage-specific manner. Low levels of the 4.0-kb transcript are first... 

Godin, I., Deed, R., Cooke, J., Zsebo, K., Dexter, M., and Wylie, C. C. (1991). Effects of steel gene product on mouse primordial germ cells in culture. Nature 352 807-809. 

Matsushime, H Jinno, A., Takagi, N and Shibuya, M. (1990). A novel mammalian protein kinase gene (mak) is highly expressed in testicular germ cells at and after meiosis. Mol. Cell. Biol. 10 2261-2268. 

Mintz, B., and Russell, E. S. (1957). Gene-induced embryological modifications of primordial germ cells in the mouse. J. Exp. Zool. 134 207-230. 

The highly restricted tissue-specific transcription of c-mos poses an interesting problem in gene regulation during germ cell development. Moreover, c-mos is transcribed from different promoters in mouse spermatocytes and oocytes (Fig. 4) (Propst et al., 1987). In spermatocytes, transcription initiates approximately 280 nucleotides upstream of the c-mos ATG (Propst et al., 1987), whereas the transcription start site in oocytes has been mapped to 53 base pairs upstream of the ATG (Pal et al., 1991). Neither the spermatocyte nor oocyte promoter regions are... 

Albert Tauber I think I can answer that. If one is talking about the generation of diversity, certainly the gene shuffling that goes into making an antibody of a T-cell receptor would be the same kind of process that one looks at in terms of replication of germ cells. 

Gene mutations occur in two ways they can be inherited from a parent or acquired during a person s lifetime. Mutations that are passed from parent to child are called hereditary mutations or germline mutations (because they are present in the egg and sperm cells, which are also called germ cells). This type of mutation is present throughout a person s life in virtually every cell in the body. 

Cells can be divided into germ cells and somatic cells. Germ cells are reproductive cells, for example, ova or sperm. Germ cells contain genetic characteristics that are passed on to the next generation. Somatic cells do not contribute their genes to future generations they are the tissue cells such as nerve cells and muscle cells. 

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