Paternal imprint essential for the inheritance of telomere identity in XXXX .

@entity44540 @entity238
Chromatin remodeling during sperm maturation could erase epigenetic landmarks on the paternal genome, creating a challenge for its reestablishment on fertilization. Here, we show that selective retention of a chromosomal protein in mature sperm protects the identity of paternal telomeres in @entity238 . The @entity44540 ( @entity44540 ) gene is a duplication of hiphop that encodes a telomeric protein. Although HipHop protects telomeres in somatic cells, @entity44540 is produced exclusively in males and localizes to telomeres in postmitotic cells, including mature sperm. In embryos fathered by @entity44540 mutants, the maternal supplies fail to reestablish a protective cap on paternal telomeres, leading to their fusions. These fusions hinder the segregation of the paternal genome and result in haploid embryos with maternal chromosomes. The functional divergence between hiphop and @entity44540 manifests not only in their expression patterns but also in the protein functions that they encode. By swapping the two coding regions, we show that @entity44540 can replace HipHop for somatic protection; however, HipHop cannot replace @entity44540 in the germ line to specify telomere identity, because HipHop ectopically expressed in the testis is removed from chromatin during sperm maturation. HipHop lacks a short motif in @entity44540 that is essential for @entity44540 to survive the remodeling process. We show that the combined functions of HipHop and @entity44540 are likely fulfilled by the single ancestral hiphop locus in other @entity238 species, supporting the hypothesis that the evolutionary process of subfunctionalization was responsible for the preservation of the hiphop- @entity44540 duplicate.
