Abstract
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of important biological elements that regulates gene expression by translational repression or transcript degradation both in plants and animals. The origin, distribution and evolution of the miRNA genes have been systematically studied in many model plants, but they are not well understood in wheat. In this study, we have systematically identified the miRNA precursors and mature miRNAs in wheat group 7 chromosomes by computational analysis in the isolated chromosome sequences. A total of 716 precursors belonging to 43 miRNA families were identified, of which 12 miRNAs families (27.91 %) were not reported in wheat. Further analysis found that there were less mature miRNAs but more miRNA precursors distributing on 7D compared to 7A and 7B, suggesting that wheat group 7 homoeologous chromosome eliminated some miRNA precursors with the potential to yield the same miRNA and formed a more precise regulatory network via the two hybridization events. The target genes of all the newly identified miRNAs were also predicted. The results of this study are beneficial to improve our understanding of the distribution of wheat miRNAs and its evolutionary role in polyploidisation.
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Acknowledgment
This research was mainly funded by 863 program (2012AA10A308) from Chinese of Ministry of Science and Technology, and 948 Program (2010-S1) from Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, also partially supported by the Open Project Program (CSBAA2011-01), State Key Laboratory of Crop Stress Biology in Arid Areas and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31271705).
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P. Deng and X. Nie contributed equally to this work.
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Table S1
Primers used for qRT-PCR analysis (DOC 44 kb)
Table S2
List of computational identified miRNAs of group 7 chromosomes in T. aestivum and their characteristics (DOC 1141 kb)
Table S3
The detail lists of miRNA families shared by wheat group 7 chromosomes (DOC 62 kb)
Table S4
List of predicted targets of total miRNAs distribution on wheat group 7 chromosomes (DOC 694 kb)
Table S5
List of predicted targets of newly identified miRNAs distribution on wheat group 7 chromosomes (DOC 245 kb)
Table S6
The detail list of functional enrichment for the miRNA targets identified (DOC 96 kb)
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Deng, P., Nie, X., Wang, L. et al. Computational Identification and Comparative Analysis of miRNAs in Wheat Group 7 Chromosomes. Plant Mol Biol Rep 32, 487–500 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11105-013-0669-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11105-013-0669-x