Figure 5.

Injection of any of the xNAP1 constructs leads to axial defects. (a) Injected constructs are shown with conserved regions indicated. Basic regions marked by a black box, the PEST sequence is shown in green embedded in the C-terminal basic region. The NLS is marked in red and the SFFNFF shown in purple. (b) One-cell embryos were injected with 100 pg of either full-length or truncated versions of xNAP1. Un-injected embryos from the same fertilization were cultured in parallel as controls. Embryos were grown in modified bath serum at 18°C until stage 36, fixed in MEMFA (0.5 M MOPS, pH 7.4, 0.5 M EGTA, 0.5 M MgSO₄ and 37% formaldehyde) and stored at −20°C in methanol before photographing. All forms of injected xNAP1 gave rise to a shorter A/P axis (lack of head and tail are arrowed) than the un-injected control embryos shown in (c).