Gene silencing articles from across Nature Portfolio

CREBBP and KMT2D mutations frequently co-occur in B cell lymphomas with unclear significance. Here the authors show that they cooperate to skew B cell fate decisions and induce a CD8-depleted immune-evasive microenvironment to facilitate lymphomagenesis.

POU2AF2 is a co-activator of POU2F3 in normal and neoplastic tuft cells, such as small cell lung cancer. Here, the authors report that POU2AF2 dictates opposing transcriptional regulation at distal enhance elements.

Kdm1a is a histone demethylase implicated in intellectual disability. Here, the authors show that removing Kdm1a in neurons of the adult mouse forebrain disrupts silencing of nonneuronal genes and chromatin organization, emphasizing its role in preserving neuronal genome integrity.

Here, the authors identify neuron-specific miR-9 that potentially blocks HSV-1 neuronal replication by targeting host OCT-1 and ONECUT transcription factors involved in epigenetic activation of HSV-1 productive-cycle genes. Thus miR-9 promotes viral epigenetic silencing and latent infection in neurons.

Experiments in mice show that designed epigenome editors that contain domains of transcriptional repressors can enable stable epigenetic silencing of Pcsk9, a gene with a role in cholesterol homeostasis, without inducing DNA breaks.

Argonaute proteins are loaded with small RNAs to confer target RNA specificity and proper gene silencing. Here, the authors establish that HRDE-2 recruits the unloaded nuclear Argonaute HRDE-1 to germ granules to facilitate correct small RNA loading.

The effect of DNA methylation on gene expression has been known for decades. However, the mechanism by which DNA methylation functions to repress transcription has remained a major question in the field. Wang et al. now narrow this gap through their examination of the methylation binding protein MBD2 and expose how DNA methylation is read upstream of transcriptional repression.

Sarkar et al. identify a feedback loop between the methyltransferase SETDB1 and nuclear pore complexes that ensures silencing of early-oogenesis genes as oocyte specification progresses.

Single-cell nanobody-tethered transposition followed by sequencing (scNTT-seq) is a new assay that measures the genome-wide presence of multiple histone modifications and protein–DNA binding sites at single-cell resolution. scNTT-seq generates high-resolution multimodal maps of chromatin states with high accuracy and sensitivity.

Transposons and their host genomes are entangled in an evolutionary arms race, recounts Tuğçe Aktaş.