Our study of transgenes targeted by an endogenous piRNA may recapitulate the fate of transposons that are transmitted in rare horizontal transfer events, in which a single transposon insertion could be subjected to dual layers of silencing, as the locus would likely remain heterozygous for a number of generations before potentially becoming fixed.
"Maybe someday," the author writes in "Afterimage," "I'll manage to break through that layer of silence and amnesia". He seems certain to keep trying.
Weller writes about "a layer of silence".
We propose that unpaired chromatin that has been subjected to silencing by a piRNA trigger can be subjected to an additional layer of silencing during meiosis that then makes the original piRNA trigger dispensable.
Beaten and left in a cell, too ashamed to admit his identity or even where he lives, he is transformed when he is mistaken for a resistance fighter: "A fierce desire gripped me to clap my hands, to sing, to ululate and scream until the layers of necessity, silence, humiliation, and submission were all gone.
Over many years and visits, he peels away the layers of terror-induced silence and forgetting, and lets people tell their stories – heartbreaking accounts of brutalisation, betrayals and massacres.
But if libraries are meant to be slow-moving places under layers of dust and silence, then it's nothing like that here.
In addition to these rather direct actions of the Polycomb complexes, another layer of epigenetic silencing is brought about by their interaction with the DNA methylation system.
For the last decade, a different kind of rail gang — professors and students, scientists and landscapers — has been digging away at the layers of soil, myth and silence to unearth the unlucky inhabitants of Duffy's Cut and place them in both historical context and consecrated soil.
