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piRNAs: No Longer the Little Brother

Sep 24, 2008

In PNAS this week, researchers at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique have found that piRNAs play a role in post-transcriptional gene-silencing of transposable elements in Drosophila egg cells. They showed that the repression of the functional I elements located in euchromatin requires piRNA proteins, and the amount of ovarian I element piRNAs correlates with the strength of the repression.

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