ScienceSketch by first authors Rippei Hayashi and Jakob Schnabl, postdoc and PhD Student in the Brennecke Lab at IMBA, about their 2019 paper on the genetic and mechanistic diversity of piRNA 3'-end formation.
Publication: www.nature.com/articles/nature20162
Recorded live on June 15th, 2018 at Carnegie Embryology in Baltimore, at the Carnegie Embryology Minisymposium 2018 on Molecular Mechanics of Adaptation. Julius Brennecke speaks about molecular and conceptual principles underlying the piRNA pathway, a small RNA guided defense pathway that protects the animal germline genome against mobile genetic elements.
Mostafa ElMaghraby, former Vienna BioCenter PhD Student in the Brennecke Lab and DOC fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, explains how the cell rewires nuclear RNA export to protect genome integrity. In a collaboration with postdoc Peter Andersen (now faculty at Aarhus University, Denmark), Mostafa showed that the piRNA pathway utilizes and re-purposes preexisting building blocks in the cell to export the long single-stranded piRNA precursors from the nucleus and to target them to the cytoplasmic piRNA biogenesis machinery. Original publication: ElMaghraby, Andersen et al., "A heterochromatin-specific RNA export pathway facilitates piRNA production", Cell, DOI 10.1016/j.cell.2019.07.007
