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The Role of Long Non-coding RNAs in Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Plants

  • Chapter
Elucidation of Abiotic Stress Signaling in Plants

Abstract

Non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) are a family of regulatory RNAs, which do not encode mRNA, rRNA or tRNA, found in a variety of organisms including plants. Different classes of ncRNAs have been identified based on their length and their position in the genome, including small ncRNAs (microRNAs and small-interfering RNAs), natural antisense transcripts (NATs), and long intronic/intergenic ncRNAs (lncRNAs, 200nt or longer). Recent advances in next-generation sequencing technologies and computational analysis for transcriptome profiling have led to the genome-wide identification of ncRNAs. Functional characterization of these ncRNAs has implicated them to play a role in a wide range of cellular functions, such as epigenetic silencing, transcriptional regulation, and RNA metabolism. Emerging evidence suggest that several lncRNAs play important roles in many fundamental biological processes including growth and development as well as abiotic stress responses. Recent findings on the roles of lncRNAs in the aforementioned plant processes are summarized in this chapter.

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Acknowledgment

Work in the corresponding author’s laboratory is partially supported by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada.

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  1. Department of Agricultural Food and Nutritional Science, 4–10 Agriculture/Forestry Centre, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada, T6G 2P5

    Swati Megha, Urmila Basu, Muhammad H. Rahman & Nat N. V. Kav

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  1. Swati Megha
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  2. Urmila Basu
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  4. Nat N. V. Kav
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Correspondence to Nat N. V. Kav .

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  1. Department of Plant Molecular Biology, University of Delhi South Campus Dept. of Plant Molecular Biology, Dhaula Kuan, India

    Girdhar K. Pandey

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Megha, S., Basu, U., Rahman, M.H., Kav, N.N.V. (2015). The Role of Long Non-coding RNAs in Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Plants. In: Pandey, G. (eds) Elucidation of Abiotic Stress Signaling in Plants. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2540-7_4

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