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- Title
Fighting an old war with a new weapon-silencing transposons by Piwi-interacting RNA.
- Authors
Guo, Manhong; Wu, Yuliang
- Abstract
Discovered six decades ago, transposons are known to selfishly multiply within and between chromosomes. Although they may play a creative role in building new functional parts of the genome, transposons usually cause insertional mutagenesis and/or turn nearby genes on or off. To maintain genome integrity, cells use a variety of strategies to defend against the proliferation of transposons. A class of small noncoding RNA, discovered seven years ago and called piRNA, is a new player in the war to silence transposons. piRNA is made via two biogenesis pathways: the primary processing pathway and the ping-pong amplification loop. These pathways are critically involved in transposon RNA degradation, DNA methylation, and histone modification machinery that represses transposons. In this review, we briefly introduce transposon-caused genomic instability and summarize our current understanding of the piRNA pathway, focusing on its key function in transposon silencing. © 2013 IUBMB Life, 65(9):739-747, 2013
- Subjects
TRANSPOSONS; CHROMOSOMES; GENOMES; GENES; ORIGIN of life; GENOMICS
- Publication
IUBMB Life, 2013, Vol 65, Issue 9, p739
- ISSN
1521-6543
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1002/iub.1192