Figure 1

flamenco , a major Piwi-interacting RNA (piRNA) cluster in somatic support cells of the Drosophila ovary. The flamenco locus contains a particular family of transposon (boxes with white arrows; the arrows denotes the direction of each transposon) in its transcription unit. Almost all transposons are truncated and/or inactivated. The direction of the transposons is exclusively anti-sense with regard to transcription in this region (gray arrow). This region spans about 150 kb, and is thought to behave as a single transcriptional unit.