PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Lianna Schwartz-Orbach
AU  - Chenzhen Zhang
AU  - Simone Sidoli
AU  - Richa Amin
AU  - Diljeet Kaur
AU  - Anna Zhebrun
AU  - Julie Ni
AU  - Sam Gu
TI  - <em>C. elegans</em> nuclear RNAi factor SET-32 deposits the transgenerational heritable histone modification, H3K23me3
AID  - 10.1101/2020.02.19.956656
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.02.19.956656
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/02/20/2020.02.19.956656.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/02/20/2020.02.19.956656.full
AB  - Nuclear RNAi provides a highly tractable system to study RNA-mediated chromatin changes and epigenetic inheritance. Recent studies have indicated that the regulation and function of nuclear RNAi-mediated heterochromatin are highly complex. Our knowledge of histone modifications and the corresponding histone modifying enzymes involved in the system remains limited. In this study, we show that the heterochromatin mark, H3K23me3, is induced by nuclear RNAi at both exogenous and endogenous targets in C. elegans. In addition, dsRNA-induced H3K23me3 can be inherited for four generations. We demonstrate that the histone methyltransferase SET-32, methylates H3K23 in vitro. Both set-32 and the germline nuclear RNAi Argonaute, hrde-1, are required for nuclear RNAi-induced H3K23me3 in vivo. Our data poise H3K23me3 as an additional chromatin modification in the nuclear RNAi pathway and provides the field with a new target for uncovering the role of heterochromatin in transgenerational epigenetic silencing.