Fig. 2.
The embryonic timing of zygotic genome activation. Embryonic stages of Xenopus tropicalis development (Nieuwkoop & Faber, 1994) are superimposed on a graph of mRNA expression profiles of several genes. Time in hours post fertilization (hpf ) is presented on the X-axis. foxh1 mRNA is shown as an example of a maternally deposited message that increases its levels by cytoplasmic polyadenylation in the period before ZGA. nodal3.1 and sia2 are two examples of genes that begin their pre-MBT transcription between 3 and 3.5hpf, which corresponds to the period between 64 cell and stage 7. gsc, ventx and sox17 are examples of genes that begin transcription at MBT. Data and 95% confidence intervals are derived from Owens et al. (2016) and the Y-axis values use a square root scaling.