Gene silencing is an important tool in the study of gene function. Virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS) and hairpin RNA interference (hpRNAi), both of which rely on small interfering RNAs, together with artificial microRNAs (amiRNA), are amongst the most popular methods for reduction of gene activity in plants. However, all three approaches have limitations. Here, we introduce miRNA-induced gene...

To investigate the relationship between cytosine methylation and gene silencing in Arabidopsis, we constructed strains containing the ddm1 hypomethylation mutation and a methylated and silenced PAI2 tryptophan biosynthetic gene (MePAI2) that results in a blue fluorescent plant phenotype. The ddm1 mutation had both an immediate and a progressive effect on PAI gene silencing. In the first generat...

Epigenetic gene silencing plays a critical role in regulating gene expression and contributes to organismal development and cell fate acquisition in eukaryotes. In fission yeast, Schizosaccharomyces pombe, heterochromatin-associated gene silencing is known to be mediated by RNA processing pathways including RNA interference (RNAi) and a 3'-5' exoribonuclease complex, the exosome. Here, we repor...

Hat1p and Hat2p are the two subunits of a type B histone acetyltransferase from Saccharomyces cerevisiae that acetylates free histone H4 on lysine 12 in vitro. However, the role for these gene products in chromatin function has been unclear, as deletions of the HAT1 and/or HAT2 gene displayed no obvious phenotype. We have now identified a role for Hat1p and Hat2p in telomeric silencing. Telomer...

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...

Background: Aberrant methylation of cytosine-guanine dinucleotide islands leads to inactivation of tumor suppressor genes in breast cancer. Tumor suppressor genes are unmethylated in normal tissue and often become hypermethylated during tumor formation, leading to gene silencing. We investigated the association between E-cadherin (CDH1) and estrogen receptor-α (ESRα) gene promoter methylation a...

The incidence of asthma is increasing globally; however, current treatments are only able to cure a certain proportion of patients. There is an urgent need to develop novel therapies. β1 integrin serves a role in the pathophysiology of asthma through the development of airway remodeling. The aim of the present study was to investigate silencing of the β1 integrin gene in pre‑clinical models of ...

The argonaute (AGO) protein, as an important member of the small RNA (sRNA) regulatory pathway gene-silencing complex (RNA-induced silencing complex, RISC), is a key protein that mediates gene and plays role in recruitment sRNAs. In this study, bioinformatics was used to identify AGO family poplar study its expression various tissues response abiotic stress treatments. A total 15 PtAGO genes we...

RNAi based strategies to induce gene silencing are commonly employed in numerous model organisms but have not been extensively used in zebrafish. We found that introduction of transgenes containing convergent transcription units in zebrafish embryos induced stable transcriptional gene silencing (TGS) in cis and trans for reporter (mCherry) and endogenous (One-Eyed Pinhead (OEP) and miR-27a/b) g...

The IL-60 system is a transient universal vector system for expression and silencing in plants [1]. This vector has been derived from Tomato yellow leaf curl virus (TYLCV). The viral intergenic region (IR) is a non-coding short (314 b) sequence separating the viral sense-oriented genes from the complementary-oriented genes. IR carries the viral origin of replication as well as a promoter at eac...