Maternal depletion of Piwi, a component of the RNAi system, impacts heterochromatin formation in Drosophila.
A persistent question in epigenetics is how heterochromatin is targeted for assembly at specific domains, and how that chromatin state is faithfully transmitted.Stable heterochromatin is necessary to silence transposable elements (TEs) and maintain genome integrity.Both the RNAi system and heterochromatin components HP1 (Swi6) and H3K9me2/3 are req