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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2018 Jan 1.
Published in final edited form as: Adv Exp Med Biol. 2017;953:49–82. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-46095-6_2

Fig. 2.4.

Fig. 2.4

Spatial accumulation of the Cripto-1 protein in Xenopus embryos is controlled by regulated translation of the Cripto-1 mRNA. In Xenopus, the Cripto-1 mRNA is uniformly distributed throughout the egg and all embryonic cells. The Cripto-1 protein is only produced in animal cells of embryos after fertilization, but not vegetal cells (Cragle and MacNicol 2014a). Differential accumulation of the Cripto-1 protein in Xenopus embryos is due to the spatially regulated translation of the Cripto-1 mRNA. Translation is activated in animal cells and repressed in vegetal cells (Heasman et al. 1994; Zhang et al. 2009). The Bicaudal-C (Bic-C) protein is responsible for repression functions in the vegetal cells (Heasman 2006a; Houston 2013; Zhang et al. 2013, 2014). The Bic-C mRNA is localized to the vegetal cortex of developing oocytes, and as a consequence after fertilization, Bic-C is restricted to vegetal cells (Schohl and Fagotto 2002)