BioProject

PIWI-interacting RNAs (piRNAs) promote fertility in many animals. Yet, whether this is due to their conserved role in repressing repetitive elements (REs) remains unclear. More...

PIWI-interacting RNAs (piRNAs) promote fertility in many animals. Yet, whether this is due to their conserved role in repressing repetitive elements (REs) remains unclear. Here, we show that the progressive loss of fertility in Caenorhabditis elegans lacking piRNAs is not caused by derepression of REs or other piRNA targets, but rather mediated by the epigenetic silencing of all the replicative histone genes. In the absence of piRNAs, downstream components of the piRNA pathway relocalize from germ granules and piRNA targets to histone mRNAs to synthesize antisense small RNAs (sRNAs) and induce transgenerational silencing. Removal of the downstream components of the piRNA pathway restores histone mRNA expression and fertility in piRNA mutants, and the inheritance of histone sRNAs in wild-type worms adversely affects their fertility for multiple generations. We conclude that the sRNA-mediated silencing of histone genes impairs fertility of piRNA mutants and may serve to maintain piRNAs across evolution. Overall design: 25 samples were analyzed by sRNA-seq, including replicates in some cases (sample name contains 'rep'). For the experiments using worms at different generation time independent CRISPR-Cas9 lines were analyzed as replicates (sample name contains 'line') Less...