Polycomb group proteins preserve body patterning through development by maintaining transcriptional silencing of homeotic genes. A long-standing hypothesis is that silencing involves creating chromatin structure that is repressive to gene transcription. We demonstrate by electron microscopy that core components of Polycomb Repressive Complex 1 induce compaction of defined nucleosomal arrays. Co...

The malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum undergoes antigenic variation to evade host immune responses through switching expression of variant surface proteins encoded by the var gene family. We demonstrate that both a subtelomeric transgene and var genes are subject to reversible gene silencing. Var gene silencing involves the SIR complex as gene disruption of PfSIR2 results in activation of ...

Abbreviations: attE: attacin E gene ELISA: Enzyme Linked Immunosorbent Assay gusA: β-glucuronidase gene GUS: glucuronidase nos: nopaline synthase gene nptII: neomycin phosphotransferase II gene NPTII: neomycin phosphotransferase II protein PCR: polymerase chain reaction PTGS: post-transcriptional gene silencing RNA: ribonucleic acid RT-PCR: reverse transcription PCR T-DNA: transfer DNA TGS: tra...

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) post-transcriptionally repress gene expression via the miRNA-induced silencing complex (miRISC), which includes miRNA, Argonaute and a GW182 family member. Here we show that in Caenorhabditis elegans, miRNA-mediated gene silencing is modulated by macroautophagy, a lysosome-mediated degradation process. Loss of autophagy activity suppresses developmental defects caused by part...

RNAi refers to several different types of gene silencing mediated by small, dsRNA molecules. Over the course of 20 years, the scientific understanding of RNAi has developed from the initial observation of unexpected expression patterns to a sophisticated understanding of a multi-faceted, evolutionarily conserved network of mechanisms that regulate gene expression in many organisms. It has also ...

Viroids are autonomously replicating, small singlestranded circular RNA molecules that do not code for proteins and may cause disease in infected, susceptible plants. Viroids have the ability to induce both RNA-mediated transcriptional gene silencing (TGS) and posttranscriptional gene silencing (PTGS) in infected plants. Viroid PTGS has also been demonstrated in a wheat germ extract system. A p...

background: introduction of the rna interference (rnai) machinery has guided the researchers to discover the function of essential vital or virulence factor genes in the microorganisms such as fungi. in the filamentous fungus aspergillus nidulans, the gene sidb plays an essential role in septation, conidiation and vegetative hyphal growth. in the present study, we benefited from the rnai strate...

Heritable gene silencing is an important mechanism of tumor suppressor gene inactivation in a variety of human cancers. In the present study, we show that methylation-associated silencing of the autosomal adenine phosphoribosyltransferase (Aprt) locus occurs in primary mouse kidney cells. Aprt-deficient cells were isolated from mice that were heterozygous for Aprt, i.e., they contained one wild...

Virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS) is a powerful technique to study gene function in plants. However, very few VIGS vectors are available for monocot plants. Here we report that Foxtail mosaic virus (FoMV) can be engineered as an effective VIGS system to induce efficient silencing of endogenous genes in monocot plants including barley (Hordeum vulgare L.), wheat (Triticum aestivum) and foxtail...

The molecular mechanisms involved in transgene-induced gene silencing ('quelling') in Neurospora crassa were investigated using the carotenoid biosynthetic gene albino-1 (al-1) as a visual marker. Deletion derivatives of the al-1 gene showed that a transgene must contain at least approximately 132 bp of sequences homologous to the transcribed region of the native gene in order to induce quellin...