Abstract
MicroRNAs play a central role in gene regulation and emerge as novel targets for secondary metabolites improvement in plants. The crops thus can be improved through knowledge obtained by the study of miRNAs because of their conserved nature in gene regulation. The present study has been carried out on Tinospora cordifolia (T. cordifolia), because of its illimitable application for the treatment of various diseases. This plant has tremendous medicinal properties, yet unexplored at the molecular level, and has not received much recognition in the scientific field. Thus, here computational analysis was performed to identify T. cordifolia miRNAs using EST database. Using these miRNAs, we predicted their targets which were found to be associated with the regulation of diverse gene networks including 433 berberine biosynthesis genes in T. cordifolia. Further, selected miRNAs were validated and their expression was detected in different T. cordifolia tissues followed by expression analysis of their target mRNAs. These data were then compared with the metabolic profile of T. cordifolia with an emphasis on therapeutically important compound berberine. In this study, we did simultaneous miRNA/target gene expression and metabolome analysis which opens a new way for initiating new proposition and prioritization of miRNAs/genes/metabolites for targeted follow‑up metabolic engineering experimentations.
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The infrastructure created under UGC-SAP (DRS II); Government of India has been gratefully acknowledged. KA thankfully acknowledge the JRF awarded by DBT, Government of India.
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Saifi, M., Ashrafi, K., Nasrullah, N. et al. Integrated miRNA, target mRNA, and metabolome profiling of Tinospora cordifolia with reference to berberine biosynthesis. 3 Biotech 12, 311 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13205-022-03342-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13205-022-03342-9