eCLIP of Drosophila Asterix/Gtsf1 (endogenous promoter) in Drosophila ovarian somatic sheath (OSS) cells
Asterix/Gtsf1 has been previously been shown to be involved in the silencing of retrotransposons in animal germ cells through the piRNA pathway. Using eCLIP and a custom informatic pipeline, we found that Asterix/Gtsf1 binds directly to RNAs and preferentially interacts with tRNAs as a class. Given the role of tRNAs as primers for Long Terminal Repeat (LTR) transposons, this work implicates Asterix/Gtsf1 as exploiting tRNA dependence to identify transposon transcripts and promote piRNA silencing. Overall design: eCLIP of Drosophila Asterix/Gtsf1 in Drosophila ovarian somatic sheath (OSS) cells. The protein is under the control of its endogenous promoter is tagged with GFP-FRT-Precission-V5-3xFLAG-P2A at it C-terminus.