Fig. 5.

Piwi-piRISC transcriptional represses transposons. Piwi-piRISC, together with its binding partner Arx, recognizes the nascent transcripts of TE by base pair complementarity, thereby recruits the scaffold protein Panx which will recruit the general silencing machinery to induce H3K9me3 of the transcript source regions, H4K9me2 demethylation in the promoter region, and loss of PolII occupancy. Mael acts in parallel or downstream of H3K9me3 to make these regions silencing status probably though heterochromatin formation with HP1a binding