Nuclear lamina regulates transposable elements activation

Genome of Eukaryotic organisms contain transposable elements that can move into new locations when are active. Consequences of transposable elements mobilization are new mutations, chromosomal rearrangements and genomic instability. Heterochromatin-mediated repression and post-transcriptional RNA silencing repress transposable elements activation. We investigated the role of the nuclear lamina in the control of transposable element activation in Drosophila. To this aim, we studied the expression of different transposable elements in flies carrying lamDm0 loss of function mutations, which eliminate one of the two lamin proteins present in Drosophila. We found that the expression of most of the transposable elements analyzed is unaffected, while few of them appeared significantly up or down regulated. We found that expression of one of the small RNA cluster that control transposable elements activation is also affected in lamDm0 mutants. Finally, we analyzed the surrounding regions of transposable elements insertion points to try to understand if the effect of lamDm0 depletion also influences nearby genes.