The final of several visuals created for the Lee Lab’s website at Western Washington University, this graphic explains the less well-understood RNA interference (RNAi) in Tetrahymena thermophila which generates ~23-24 nucleotide small (s)RNAs and the Lee Lab’s current questions regarding the pathway. Figure created with BioRender.

RNA interference is able to prevent the movements of a transposon either through chromatin modification, which stops the transposon before its RNA stage, or by degrading the RNA before it is reverse transcribed back into DNA.

Conserved chromosomal functions of RNA interference (RNAi) as adapted from Gutbrod et al (2020) and created using Biorender.