The fight against genome parasites
Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - 09:01
in Biology & Nature
In the gonads of animals, genome parasites such as transposons pose a serious threat to evolutionary fitness. With their ability to bounce around in the genome, they often cause dangerous mutations. To protect genomic integrity, animals evolved a sophisticated mechanism – the so called piRNA pathway – to silence the deleterious transposons. Not much is known about the molecular processes and the involved factors that constitute the piRNA pathway. Researchers at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) in Vienna have now identified ~50 genes, that play important roles in the piRNA pathway of the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster.