Keeping endogenous retroviruses at bay

“Adult stem cells face a unique challenge of keeping transposable elements faithfully silenced during a time window of rapid proliferation and tissue regeneration. How do they achieve this goal? We leveraged the adult mouse skin as an accessible and genetically tractable system, where the hair coat undergoes cycles of hair growth, driven by its resident hair follicle stem cells that alternate between quiescence, regeneration and regression phases” explains the corresponding author, Yejing Ge.

The heterochromatinization of transposable elements involves both DNA and histone methylation, and the histone methyltransferase SETDB1 is one important regulator of the process.