Fruitflies use a belt-and-braces approach to stop genetic parasites wrecking the chromosomes in their developing eggs, report Trudi Schuepbach and her team at Princeton University, New Jersey. The team found that mutations in genes involved in the 'rasiRNA' pathway — a kind of RNA interference — led to a marked increase in the activity of mobile DNA elements called transposons. This suggests that the rasiRNA pathway normally shuts down transposons, whose activity destabilizes chromosomes.
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