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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Nikolay ZenkinORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.Insertions of transposable elements (TEs) in eukaryotic genomes are usually associated with repressive chromatin, which spreads to neighbouring genomic sequences. In ovaries of Dro-sophila melanogaster, the Piwi‐piRNA pathway plays a key role in the transcriptional silencing of TEs considered to be exerted mostly through the establishment of H3K9me3 histone marks recruiting Heterochromatin Protein 1a (HP1a). Here, using RNA‐seq, we investigated the expression of TEs and the adjacent genomic regions upon Piwi and HP1a germline knockdowns sharing a similar genetic background. We found that the depletion of Piwi and HP1a led to the derepression of only partially overlapping TE sets. Several TEs were silenced predominantly by HP1a, whereas the up-regulation of some other TEs was more pronounced upon Piwi knockdown and, surprisingly, was diminished upon a Piwi/HP1a double‐knockdown. We revealed that HP1a loss influenced the expression of thousands of protein‐coding genes mostly not adjacent to TE insertions and, in particu-lar, downregulated a putative transcriptional factor required for TE activation. Nevertheless, our results indicate that Piwi and HP1a cooperatively exert repressive effects on the transcription of euchromatic loci flanking the insertions of some Piwi‐regulated TEs. We suggest that this mechanism controls the silencing of a small set of TE‐adjacent tissue‐specific genes, preventing their inap-propriate expression in ovaries.
Author(s): Ilyin AA, Stolyarenko AD, Zenkin N, Klenov MS
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: International Journal of Molecular Sciences
Year: 2021
Volume: 22
Print publication date: 02/12/2021
Online publication date: 14/12/2021
Acceptance date: 10/12/2021
Date deposited: 17/01/2022
ISSN (print): 1661-6596
ISSN (electronic): 1422-0067
Publisher: MDPI
URL: https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms222413430
DOI: 10.3390/ijms222413430
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