Abstract
Recent findings have challenged the longstanding belief that heterochromatin is an inert and transcriptionally inactive structure. Studies in organisms ranging from fission yeast to animals have found that noncoding RNAs transcribed from heterochromatic DNA repeats function in the assembly and function of heterochromatin. In this review, we discuss the roles of RNA and RNA turnover in mechanisms that mediate heterochromatin assembly and keep heterochromatic domains silent.
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Acknowledgements
We thank members of the Moazed laboratory for discussion. The authors' research is supported by a European Molecular Biology Organization long-term fellowship and the Swiss National Science Foundation (M.B.) and by grants from the US National Institutes of Health and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (D.M.).
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Bühler, M., Moazed, D. Transcription and RNAi in heterochromatic gene silencing. Nat Struct Mol Biol 14, 1041–1048 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nsmb1315
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nsmb1315
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