ABSTRACT
Nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) is originally identified as a widespread mRNA surveillance machinery in degrading 'aberrant' mRNA species with premature termination codons (PTCs) rapidly, which protects the cells from the accumulation of truncated proteins. Recent studies show that NMD can also regulate the degradation of normal gene transcripts, which execute important cellular and physiological functions. Therefore, NMD is considered as a highly conserved post-transcriptional regulatory mechanism in eukaryotes. NMD modulates 3% to 20% of the transcriptome from yeast to human directly or indirectly, which is essential for various physiological processes, such as cell homeostasis, stress response, proliferation, and differentiation. NMD can regulate the level of transcripts that involves in development, and single knockout of most NMD factors has an embryonic lethal effect. NMD plays an important role in the self-renewal, differentiation of embryonic stem cells and is critical during embryonic development. In this review, we summarized the latest advances in the roles and mechanisms of NMD in embryonic development, in order to provide new ideas for the research on embryonic development and the treatment of embryonic development related diseases.