STUDIES ON NUCLEAR STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION IN TETRAHYMENA PYRIFORMIS: I. RNA Synthesis in Macro- and Micronuclei

Tetrahymena in the log phase of growth were pulse labeled with uridine-(3)H, fixed in acetic-alcohol, extracted with DNase, and embedded in Epon. 0.5-micro sections were cut, coated with Kodak NTB-2 emulsion, and developed after suitable exposures. Grains were counted above macronuclei, above 1000 micronuclei, and above 1000 micronucleus-sized "blanks" which were situated next to micronuclei in the visual field by means of a camera lucida. An analysis of grain counts showed that micronuclei were less than (1/2)(000) as active as macronuclei on the basis of grains per nucleus. Since micronuclei contained, on the average, about (1/2)(0) as much DNA as macronuclei, micronuclear DNA had less than 1% of the specific activity of macronuclear DNA in RNA synthesis. However, even this small amount of apparent incorporation was not significantly different from zero. Comparisons of the frequency distributions of labeled micronuclei with those of micronuclear "blanks" showed no evidence of a small population of labeled nuclei such as might be expected if micronuclei synthesized RNA for only a brief portion of the cell cycle. We conclude from these studies that there is no detectable RNA synthesis in Tetrahymena micronuclei during vegetative growth and reproduction.