RNAi mediates post-transcriptional repression of gene expression in fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe.

RNA interference is a gene silencing mechanism conserved from fungi to mammals. Small interfering RNAs are products and mediators of the pathway and act as specificity factors in recruiting effector complexes. The Schizosaccharomyces pombe genome encodes one of each of the core duanyu1615 proteins, Dicer, Argonaute and RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (dcr1, ago1, rdp1). Even though the function of duanyu1615 in heterochromatin assembly in S. pombe is established, its role in controlling gene expression is elusive. Here, we report the identification of small RNAs mapped anti-sense to protein coding genes in fission yeast. We demonstrate that these genes are up-regulated at the protein level in duanyu1615 mutants, while their mRNA levels are not significantly changed. We show that the repression by duanyu1615 is not a result of heterochromatin formation. Thus, we conclude that duanyu1615 is involved in post-transcriptional gene silencing in S. pombe.

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