The activity of the Caenorhabditis elegans Aquarius helicase EMB-4 enables the nuclear RNAi machinery to engage nascent RNA

Germline small RNA pathways initiate silencing of repetitive elements in animals and an interplay of nuclear small RNAs and chromatin modifications maintain this silencing, protecting the germline from spreading of transposable elements. In C. elegans germline, nuclear argonaute protein HRDE-1 initiates the transcriptional silencing pathway that is crucial for long term and heritable silencing of genes and repetitive regions. Here, we show that HRDE-1 interacts with components of the splicing machinery and the exon-junction complex. One such factor is the conserved RNA helicase EMB-4/AQR that binds introns and recruits the exon-junction proteins to newly spliced RNA. Our data shows that EMB-4/AQR is required for the transcriptional silencing pathway initiated by HRDE-1 and it functions by removing the intronic barriers to silencing thorugh its helicase function.