Remodeling of perturbed chromatin can initiate de novo transcriptional and post-transcriptional silencing.

In eukaryotes, repetitive DNA can become silenced de novo, either transcriptionally or post-transcriptionally, by processes independent of strong sequence-specific cues. The mechanistic nature of such processes remains poorly understood. We found that in the fungus , de novo initiation of both transcriptional and post-transcriptional silencing was linked to perturbed chromatin, which was produced experimentally by the aberrant activity of transcription factors at the operator array.