Figure 4

The consequences of specific versus non-specific editing. (a) Short, imperfect duplexes, such as Drosophila synaptotagmin-I, are specifically edited leading to transcript and peptide recoding. (b) Long, perfect dsRNA substrates, including those formed by nearby transposons in opposite orientation (green), are hyper-edited, leading to fewer or edited siRNAs. This may alter gene expression through RISC (yellow) targeting, but evidence also links the RNAi pathway to chromatin regulation.