Abstract
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are endogenous, 19–24‐nucleotide‐long, noncoding RNAs found in animals, plants, and some viruses. Drought is one of the major limiting factors that negatively affect productivity of plants. To date, nothing is known about the regulatory roles of miRNAs in response to drought stress in cardamom. Cardamom collected from the natural forest area in Therakkudi in the Idamalayar forest range was selected for the study. Total RNA was isolated from leaves and stems of control and drought treated cardamom plant, which was used for library construction. Ion torrent sequencing of the two small RNA libraries prepared from plants raised under well irrigated and drought stressed treatments, respectively, created 3,938,342 and 4,083,181 primary reads. A total of 150 conserved and 20 novel microRNAs were identified from both the control and the treated libraries. Discovery of 17 differentially expressed miRNAs under drought stress suggests that these might have been involved in various biological processes to improve plant tolerance to water stress. This study is the first report of drought responsive miRNAs and their targets in cardamom. The outcome of this research could provide insights into the miRNA based regulatory mechanisms in response to drought stress in monocot plants.
Highlights
MicroRNAs, which are functionally significant, noncoding RNAs (approximately 19–24 nucleotides long), act as posttranscriptional gene expression regulators by being involved in different processes like apoptosis, stress response, and differentiation and different disease conditions [1]
Sanger sequencing or chain termination method has been the dominant method of DNA sequencing which was developed by Frederick Sanger in 1977
The frequency of miRNAs in control and treatment libraries was normalized to transcripts per million (TPM) by the following formula: normalized expression = × 1,000,000 (Dataset Item 4 (Table))
Summary
MicroRNAs (miRNAs), which are functionally significant, noncoding RNAs (approximately 19–24 nucleotides (nt) long), act as posttranscriptional gene expression regulators by being involved in different processes like apoptosis, stress response, and differentiation and different disease conditions [1]. Genomic research has become revolutionized with the launch of nextgeneration sequencing (NGS) technologies since 2005. NGS is more economical than Sanger sequencing, and researchers are able to carry out many experiments which were formerly problematic. Drought is one of the major limiting factors that negatively affect the crop productivity of the plant. To resist this drought stress, plants execute several mechanisms at the molecular and physiological levels [3, 4]. Knowledge on the mechanism behind plant response to drought will be useful for better productivity [5]
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