Quantitative mapping of zinc fluxes in the mammalian egg reveals the origin of fertilization-induced zinc sparks

Fertilization of a mammalian egg induces a series of ‘zinc sparks’ that are necessary for inducing the egg-to-embryo transition. Despite the importance of these zinc efflux events little is known about their origin. To understand the molecular mechanism of the zinc spark we combined four physical approaches to resolve zinc distributions in single cells: a chemical probe for dynamic live-cell fluorescence imaging and a combination of scanning transmission electron microscopy with energy dispersive spectroscopy, X-ray fluorescence microscopy, and 3D elemental tomography for high resolution elemental mapping. We show that the zinc spark arises from a system of thousands of zinc-loaded vesicles, each of which contains, on average, 106 zinc atoms. These vesicles undergo dynamic movement during oocyte maturation and exocytosis at the time of fertilization. The discovery of these vesicles and the demonstration that zinc sparks originate from them provides a quantitative framework for understanding how zinc fluxes regulate cellular processes.

• Publication year

  2014

• Venue

  Nature Chemistry

• Publication date

  2014-12-15

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Materials Science, Chemistry

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1038/nchem.2133PMID 25615666PMCID 4315321
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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