The Caenorhabditis elegans PcG-like gene sop-2 regulates the temporal and sexual specificities of cell fates

How spatial, temporal, and sexual specific cues are integrated to specify distinct cell fates during multicellular organism development is largely unknown. Here we demonstrate that the Caenorhabditis elegans PcG-like gene sop-2 determines the temporal and sexual specificities of a row of hypodermal seam cells, in addition to specifying their positional identities. Loss-of-function of sop-2 causes premature expression of adult fates at larval stages. sop-2 acts upstream of lin-29 in the heterochronic pathway and genetically interacts with other heterochronic genes in specifying the temporal fates of seam cells at different larval stages. We show that the number of ALG-1-containing P bodies is increased in seam cells in sop-2 mutants. Furthermore, the microRNA-mediated repression of a heterochronic gene reporter is enhanced in sop-2 mutants. Mutations in sop-2 also cause partial hermaphrodite-to-male sexual transformations. The homeotic transformations, heterochronic defects, and sexual transformations can occur concomitantly in sop-2 mutants. In summary, our studies reveal that sop-2 integrates spatial, temporal, and sexual cues during C. elegans development.