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The proteins Oskar (Osk) in  Drosophila  and Bucky ball (Buc) in zebrafish act as germ plasm organizers. Both proteins recapitulate germ plasm activities but seem to be unique to their animal groups. Here, we discover that Osk and Buc show similar activities during germ cell specification.  Drosophila  Osk induces additional PGCs in zebrafish. Surprisingly, Osk and Buc do not show homologous protein motifs that would explain their related function. Nonetheless, we detect that both proteins contain stretches of intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs), which seem to be involved in protein aggregation. IDRs are known to rapidly change their sequence during evolution, which might obscure biochemical interaction motifs. Indeed, we show that Buc binds to the known Oskar interactors Vasa protein and  nanos  mRNA indicating conserved biochemical activities. These data provide a molecular framework for two proteins with unrelated sequence but with equivalent function to assemble a conserved core-complex nucleating germ plasm.

Functional equivalence of germ plasm organizers