Abstract
Yeast and filamentous fungi have been essential model systems for unveiling the secrets of RNA interference (RNAi). Research on these organisms has contributed to identifying general mechanisms and conserved eukaryotic RNAi machinery that can be found from fungi to mammals. The development of deep sequencing technologies has brought on the last wave of studies on RNAi in fungi, which has been focused on the identification of new types of functional small RNAs (sRNAs). These studies have discovered an unexpected diversity of sRNA, biogenesis pathways and new functions that are the focus of this review.
Highlights
RNA interference (RNAi) is a negative regulatory mechanism that represses the expression of target RNAs
The consequence of this uncontrolled transposon activity was a higher transposition/mutation rate. The interpretation of these results suggests that the function of small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) during sex-induced silencing (SIS) is to protect the genome of the progeny by reducing transposon activity during the sexual cycle [19]
QDE-2-interacting small RNAs (sRNAs) are a special type of Endogenous short RNAs (esRNAs) identified in N. crassa that are produced after treating this fungus with DNA-damaging agents [23]
Summary
RNAi is a negative regulatory mechanism that represses the expression of target RNAs. An RNA dependent RNA polymerase (RDRP), encoded by qde-1, was the first component of the RNAi machinery that was cloned in these screenings [4] The role of this enzyme is to generate dsRNA from the aberrant RNAs (aRNAs) that are hypothetically produced from the transgene. The enzyme required in the RNAi pathway is a ribonuclease type III that processes the dsRNA into the small interfering RNAs (siRNAs), a special type of sRNAs that exhibits a fixed size between 19 and 25 nt and has 5' phosphates and two nucleotide overhangs on the 3' ends [5] This ribonuclease is known as the Dicer enzyme and despite its essential role in RNAi, it was not one of the three qde genes that were initially identified in this fungus [6]. The different fungal sRNAs related to both aspects of RNAi, host defense and regulation of gene expression, are the focus of this review (Table 1)
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