piRNA-mediated repression of transposable elements (TE) in the germline limits the accumulation of heritable mutations caused by their transposition in the genome. It is not clear whether the piRNA pathway plays a functional role in adult, non-gonadal tissues in Drosophila melanogaster. To address this question, we first analyzed the small RNA content of adult Drosophila melanogaster heads. We found that varying amount of piRNA-sized, ping-pong positive molecules in heads correlates with contamination by gonadal tissue during RNA extraction, suggesting that most of piRNAs detected in head sequencing libraries originate from gonads. We next sequenced the heads of wild type and piwi mutants to address whether piwi loss of function would affect the low amount of piRNA-sized, ping-pong negative molecules that are still detected in heads hand-checked to avoid gonadal contamination. We find that loss of piwi does not affect significantly these 24-28 RNA molecules. Instead, we observe increased siRNA levels against the majority of Drosophila transposable element families. To determine the effect of this siRNA level change on transposon expression, we sequenced the transcriptome of wild type, piwi, dicer-2 and piwi, dicer-2 double-mutant fly heads. We find that RNA expression levels of the majority of TE families in piwi or dicer-2 mutants remain unchanged and that TE transcript abundance increases significantly only in piwi, dicer-2 double-mutants. These results lead us to suggest a dual-layer model for TE repression in adult somatic tissues. Piwi-mediated transcriptional gene silencing (TGS) established during embryogenesis constitutes the first layer of TE repression whereas Dicer-2-dependent siRNA-mediated post-transcriptional gene silencing (PTGS) provide a backup mechanism to repress TEs that escape silencing by piwi-mediated TGS.

Dual-layer transposon repression in heads of Drosophila melanogaster