Figure 2

lin-35 and lin-15B enhance somatic transgene silencing by an RNAi dependent mechanism. Worm strain JR667 expresses GFP specifically in the hypodermal seam cells from an integrated tandemly repeated array of the construct wIs51, which contains the scm::GFP reporter (a). Inactivation of either lin-35 (b) or lin-15B (c) results in enhanced silencing of the GFP transgene via a mechanism that is dependent upon the RNAi machinery, including dcr-1 (e-f) and rde-4 (h-i). Inactivation of dcr-1 (d) or rde-4 (g) alone results in a slight increase in GFP expression, indicating a background level of transgene silencing in wild-type worms. Worms were fed on 1:1 mixes of the indicated RNAi feeding strains and RNAi feeding experiments were performed as described in Materials and methods. Control (ctrl) RNAi experiments used the same non-targeting RNAi clone as used in Figure 1. See Table 5 for quantification of this data.