Abstract
Environmental stresses are major constraints that limit the leaf productivity and quality of mulberry. LncRNAs have emerged as important regulators in response to biotic and abiotic stresses in plants. However, the functions and mechanisms of most lncRNAs remain largely unknown. A novel lncRNA designated as MuLnc1 was found to be cleaved by mul-miR3954 and produce secondary siRNAs in a 21 nt phase in mulberry. It was demonstrated that one of the siRNAs produced, si161579, can silence the expression of the calmodulin-like protein gene CML27 of mulberry (MuCML27). When MuCML27 was heterologously expressed in Arabidopsis, the transgenic plants exhibited enhanced resistance to Botrytis cinerea and Pseudomonas syringae pv tomato DC3000. In addition, the transgenic MuCML27-overexpressing Arabidopsis plants are more tolerant to salt and drought stresses. Furthermore, the network of mul-miR3954-MuLnc1-siRNAs-mRNAs was modeled to elucidate the interaction between lncRNAs and sRNAs with mRNAs. All of these, taken together, suggest that MuLnc1 was associated with environmental stress in mulberry and may be considered as a potential genetic improvement target gene of mulberry. The information provided may shed light on the complicated gene expression regulatory mechanisms in mulberry stress responses.
Highlights
Mulberry (Morus spp), an important food plant of the silkworms (Bombyx mori), is widely cultivated throughout the world in subtropical and temperate regions and is subjected to various environmental stresses during its entire life cycle (Ji et al, 2010)
MuLnc1 was predicted to be a target of mul-miR3954 (Figure 1A), and this was further experimentally verified by mRNA degradome sequencing (Figure 1B)
To explore whether MuLnc1 functioned as a target transcript of mul-miR3954, the correlation between the Secondary siRNAs Triggered by mul-miR3954-Mediated Cleavage of MuLnc1
Summary
Mulberry (Morus spp), an important food plant of the silkworms (Bombyx mori), is widely cultivated throughout the world in subtropical and temperate regions and is subjected to various environmental stresses during its entire life cycle (Ji et al, 2010). A large number of non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) have been identified and found to play important roles in various biological processes including plant responses to environmental stresses (Ghildiyal and Zamore, 2009; Zhu and Wang, 2012; Joshi et al, 2016; Zhao et al, 2016). Identification and characterization of stress-responsive ncRNAs and defining their regulatory networks will improve our understanding of the mechanisms underlying mulberry responses to environmental stresses
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