The piRNA Response to Retroviral Invasion of the Koala Genome.

ABSTRACT: Antisense Piwi-interacting RNAs (piRNAs) guide silencing of established transposons during germline development, and sense piRNAs drive ping-pong amplification of the antisense pool, but how the germline responds to genome invasion is not understood. The KoRV-A gammaretrovirus infects the soma and germline and is sweeping through wild koalas by a combination of horizontal and vertical transfer, allowing direct analysis of retroviral invasion of the germline genome. Gammaretroviruses produce spliced Env mRNAs and unspliced transcripts encoding Gag, Pol, and the viral genome, but KoRV-A piRNAs are almost exclusively derived from unspliced genomic transcripts and are strongly sense-strand biased. Significantly, selective piRNA processing of unspliced proviral transcripts is conserved from ins

SUBMITTER: Yu T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6800666 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature