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Background: The piRNA machinery is well known for its role in mediating epigenetic silencing of transposons and recent studies suggest that this function may also involve piRNA-guided cleavage of transposon-derived transcripts.As many piRNAs appear to have the capacity to target diverse mRNAs and long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs), it raises an intriguing possibility that piRNAs may extensively act like siRNAs to degrade specific mRNAs and long non-coding RNAs.