For one of my other courses, we were asked to select a paper centered on transposons to present in small groups.

I stumbled upon piwi interacting RNAs and its function in relation to transposons, and thought it was a pretty neat molecule. This prompted me to research if there was any associated roles during development.

This led me to Ishizu and Siomi’s review “Biology of PIWI-interacting RNAs: new insights into biogenesis and function inside and outside of germlines”. Overall, I thought this paper was well-written and set the reader up well for understanding PIWI-interacting RNA molecules and illuminate insights of this molecule during embryogenesis.

Fun fact: Animals lacking piRNA (impairment in the protein or its expression) can exhibit sterility! Whether this is also found in humans is still to be discovered.

Link to the paper:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23124062