Abstract
Key message
1599 novel circRNAs and 1583 heat stress-specific circRNAs were identified in Arabidopsis. Heat stress enhanced accumulation of circRNAs remarkably. Heat stress altered the sizes of circRNAs, numbers of circularized exons and alterative circularization events. A putative circRNA-mediated ceRNA networks under heat stress was established.
Abstract
Heat stress retards plant growth and destabilizes crop yield. The noncoding RNAs were demonstrated to be involved in plant response to heat stress. As a newly-characterized class of noncoding RNAs, circular RNAs (circRNAs) play important roles in transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulation. A few recent investigations indicated that plant circRNAs were differentially expressed under abiotic stress. However, little is known about how heat stress mediates biogenesis of circRNAs in plants. Here, we uncovered 1599 previously-unknown circRNAs and 1583 heat-specific circRNAs, by RNA-sequencing and bioinformatic analysis. Our results indicated that much more circRNAs were expressed under heat stress than in control condition. Besides, heat stress also increased the length of circRNAs, the quantity of circularized exons, and alternative circularization events. Moreover, we observed a positive correlation between expression patterns of some circRNAs and their parental genes. The prediction of ceRNA (competing endogenous RNA) networks indicated that differentially-expressed circRNAs could influence expression of many important genes, that participate in response to heat stress, hydrogen peroxide, and phytohormone signaling pathways, by interacting with the corresponding microRNAs. Together, our observations indicated that heat stress had great impacts on the biogenesis of circRNAs. Heat-induced circRNAs might participate in plant response to heat stress through the circRNA-mediated ceRNA networks.
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Change history
22 January 2018
Due to an unfortunate turn of events, the first name of the fifth author appeared incorrectly in the original publication and should have read Guangbing. The correct representation of the authors’ names and their affiliation is listed here and should be treated as definitive.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Hundred Talents Program (Chinese Academy of Sciences), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 31400265 and 31501379), the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grand No. XDPB0404), Key Program for International S&T Cooperation from Science & Technology Department of Sichuan Province (2017HH0025), and Southeast Asia Biodiversity Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Y4ZK111B01). Thanks to Chengdu Basebiotech Co., Ltd for providing assistance on bioinformatic analysis.
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SW, TP, HL, and GD designed experiments. TP, XS, and YL conducted the experiments. SW, HL, and TP performed the bioinformatics analysis. SW and TP wrote the article.
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A correction to this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11103-018-0705-1.
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Pan, T., Sun, X., Liu, Y. et al. Heat stress alters genome-wide profiles of circular RNAs in Arabidopsis . Plant Mol Biol 96, 217–229 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11103-017-0684-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11103-017-0684-7