Curative research on Centella asiatica L. miRNA and their role in plant development

Abstract

Centella asiatica L. is one of the commonly used medicinal plants with anti-inflammatory, anti-viral, anti-bacterial, anti-fungal roles. This plant species is also rich in constituents like flavonoids, glycosides, steroids, alkaloids, antileproic agents and triterpene saponins. The regulation of such essential components are found to be controlled by ∼22 nucleotide long conserved small non-coding RNA entities, microRNA (miRNA). Therefore, identification of such conserved miRNA homologs are essential for understanding gene regulatory pathways. In the present study, computational approach was utilized to identify two of such miRNAs, miR5658 and miR827 of length 18 and 21 respectively from available Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs) of C. asiatica. The thermodynamic characteristics of the precursors, i.e. stem loop structure, were also generated in terms of minimal folding energy, adjusted minimal folding energy and minimal folding energy index. A total of 135 and 18 target genes were predicted and annotated for miR5658 and miR827 respectively, which are also found to have important roles in 35 and 12 pathways, respectively. The present study has revealed the miRNAs in C. asiatica same as their orthologs with a detailed investigation of their targets which will further assist the researchers to understand the regulation of different genes in C. asiatica.