Argonautes team up to silence transposable elements in Arabidopsis

The de novo silencing of transposable elements in plants and animals is mediated in part by RNA-directed chromatin modification. In flowering plants, AGO4 has been seen as the key argonaute protein in the RNA-directed DNA methylation pathway that links the plant-specific RNA polymerase V with the de novo DNA methyltransferase DRM2 (Zhong et al, 2014). Two recent papers in The EMBO Journal strongly implicate a role for the AGO6 protein in the process of de novo silencing.