Intracellular pattern reversal in Tetrahymena thermophila. II. Transient expression of a janus phenocopy in balanced doublets

Abstract

Homopolar doublets of Tetrahymena thermophila which have two normal oral systems directly opposite one another may undergo a global transformation of cell surface geometry to create transient imitations of mirror-image configurations brought about by mutations at janus gene loci. The process by which a typical doublet transforms into a janus-like organization involves loss of capacity to form oral structures at one of the two normal oral meridians, followed by interpolation of reversed oral structures at a new location to the cell's right of the disappearing normal oral meridian. At the same time, the contractile vacuole pore (CVP) set on the side of the cell that is undergoing the transformation shifts to the left. The combination of these events creates a symmetrical large-scale organization in which both of the CVP sets are situated on one side of the cell, between the normal and the partially reversed oral apparatus. This unilateral positioning of CVP sets is commonly manifested even when reversed oral structures are absent. These configurations probably represent intermediate stages in the transformation of balanced typical doublets into singlets. We propose that this pathway of regulation from the doublet to the singlet state, like the more common one that starts from unbalanced typical doublets (described in the preceding paper), involves reverse intercalation. The remarkable resemblance between the transient configuration described here and the stable configuration of janus mutant cells leads us to suggest that the phenotype of the mutant is also a consequence of reverse-intercalation, in that case provoked by a loss of capacity to maintain positional values rather than by a geometrical instability in the system of positional values.