Specialized piRNA Pathways Act in Germline and Somatic Tissues of the Drosophila Ovary

By C. Malone, J. Brennecke, Monica Dus, Alexander Stark, W. Richard McCombie, Ravi Sachidanandam, Gregory J. Hannon. Cell, 2009

910 citations recorded by the source corpus.

SUMMARY In Drosophila gonads, Piwi proteins and associated piRNAs collaborate with additional factors to form a small RNA-based immune system that silences mobile elements. Here, we analyzed nine Drosophila piRNA pathway mutants for their impacts on both small RNA populations and the subcellular localization patterns of Piwi proteins. We find that distinct piRNA pathways with differing components function in ovarian germ and somatic cells. In the soma, Piwi acts singularly with the conserved flamenco piRNA cluster to enforce silencing of retroviral elements that may propagate by infecting neighboring germ cells. In the germline, silencing programs encoded within piRNA clusters are optimized via a slicer-dependent amplification loop to suppress a broad spectrum of elements. The classes of transposons targeted by germline and somatic piRNA clusters, though not the precise elements, are conserved among Drosophilids, demonstrating that the architecture of piRNA clusters has coevolved with the transposons that they are tasked to control.

Subfields: Molecular Biology, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/62bdb04b89e1b000a28bfec5a5c5aa551d4f1f79

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Molecular Biology

1. Christopher K. Glass
2. M. Siomi
3. Dubravka Pezic
4. Michael G. Rosenfeld
5. Liuqing Yang
6. Alexei Aravin
7. Jie Zhang
8. Bogdan Tanasa

In Plant Science

1. M. Siomi
2. Dubravka Pezic
3. Alexei Aravin

Citations in the corpus

• Nuclear Receptor-Induced Chromosomal Proximity and DNA Breaks Underlie Specific Translocations in Cancer (2009, positive): “PIWIs have been reported to suppress retrotransposition, including LINE-1 element during spermatogenesis (Aravin et al., 2007), but more recent studies have also implicated its role in somatic organs ( Malone et al., 2009 ).”
• Transcriptional Silencing of Transposons by Piwi and Maelstrom and Its Impact on Chromatin State and Gene Expression (2012, neutral): “These were nearly exclusively classified as soma-dominant or intermediate TEs (Malone et al., 2009) that are targeted by ovarian somatic piRNAs (Figures 4A and 4B; note that the TE expression pattern differs between follicle cells and OSCs).”
• PIWI-interacting small RNAs: the vanguard of genome defence (2011, background): “The non-redundant function of PIWI can be at least partly explained by the fact that, unlike AUB and AGO3, it is expressed in follicular cells that have somatic origins and surround the developing germline cell”
• Transposition Driven Genomic Heterogeneity in the Drosophila Brain: A Dissertation (2012, neutral): “Only one specific type of somatic tissue: ovarian follicle cells have been shown to contain piRNA (Malone et al., 2009; Li et al., 2009).”