Fig 6. Knockdown of piRNA pathway components is associated with up-regulation of nxf2.

If TART-derived piRNAs are targeting nxf2 for suppression, disruption of the piRNA pathway should relieve this suppression. We examined previously published RNA-seq data from 16 piRNA component knockdowns, as well as a control (Yb) [11]. (A) Nxf2 expression increased in the majority of the 16 knockdowns (B) We compared the fold change in nxf2 expression across the 16 knockdowns to all expressed genes. Each row in the heatmap corresponds to a gene and each cell is colored based on whether the fold change in expression for that gene is larger (black) or smaller (gray) than what we observed for nxf2. Only 168 genes show larger fold change in expression across all 16 knockdowns, which places nxf2 in the top 1.4% of expressed genes in terms of its pattern of up-regulation. Underlying data can be found in S2 Data. piRNA, Piwi-interacting small RNA; RNA-seq, RNA sequencing.