The strict and efficient transcription termination is required to prevent production of aberrant readthrough transcripts that may cause transcriptional interference at neighboring genes.However,the exact regulatory mechanism remains poorly understood.Through a genetic screening of a LUGFERASE(LUC) reporter system,we found that Arabidopsis nucleosome remodeler DECREASE IN DNA METHYLATION1(DDM1) is a key component of this regulatory machinery and plays an important role in transcription termination,thus limiting transcriptional read-through(TRT).By whole-genome strandspecific RNA sequencing,we identified and confirmed 43 endogenous TRTs between genes,transposable elements(TEs),or genes and TEs in the ddml-10 mutant,which mainly occurred at heterochromatin regions.The DNA metliylation analysis of these TRT regions revealed that TRT occurred frequently at the intergenic regions with a higher methylation level in wild type comparing to the regions where TRT did not occur.Our results suggest that the level of intergenic DNA methylation may involve in preventing aberrant gene TRT or producing new gene during evolution.
The strict and efficient transcription termination is required to prevent production of aberrant read- through transcripts that may cause transcriptional interference at neighboring genes. However, the exact regulatory mechanism remains poorly understood. Through a genetic screening of a LUCIFERASE (LUC) reporter system, we found that Arabidopsis nucleosome remodeler DECREASE IN DNA METHYL- ATION1 (DDM1) is a key component of this regulatory machinery and plays an important role in tran- scription termination, thus limiting transcriptional read-through (TRT). By whole-genome strand- specific RNA sequencing, we identified and confirmed 43 endogenous TRTs between genes, transposable elements (TEs), or genes and TEs in the ddml-10 mutant, which mainly occurred at heterochromatin regions. The DNA methylation analysis of these TRT regions revealed that TRT occurred frequently at the intergenic regions with a higher methylation level in wild type comparing to the regions where TRT did not occur. Our results suggest that the level of intergenic DNA methylation may involve in preventing aberrant gene TRT or producing new gene during evolution.