Abstract
microRNAs play important regulatory role in all intrinsic cellular functions. Amongst lepidopteran insects, miRNAs from only Bombyx mori have been studied extensively with a little focus on Spodoptera sp. In the present study, we identified a total of 226 miRNAs from Spodoptera frugiperda cell line Sf21. Of the total, 116 miRNAs were well conserved within other insects, like B. mori, Drosophila melanogaster and Tribolium castenum while the remaining 110 miRNAs were identified as novel based on comparative analysis with the insect miRNA data set. Landscape distribution analysis based on Sf21 genome assembly revealed clustering of few novel miRNAs. A total of 5 miRNA clusters were identified and the largest one encodes 5 miRNA genes. In addition, 12 miRNAs were validated using northern blot analysis and putative functional role assignment for 6 Sf miRNAs was investigated by examining their relative abundance at different developmental stages of Spodoptera litura and body parts of 6th instar larvae. Further, we identified a total of 809 potential target genes with GO terms for selected miRNAs, involved in different metabolic and signalling pathways of the insect. The newly identified miRNAs greatly enrich the repertoire of insect miRNAs and analysis of expression profiles reveal their involvement at various steps of biochemical pathways of the army worm.
Highlights
MiRNAs are a class of small, non-coding RNAs, from 19–24 nt in length, that are produced by all animals and plants to regulate gene expression
Small RNA libraries from other insects as well from Sf9 cells have been reported to be rich in piRNA population [5, 19, 26, 27, 28]
The small RNA reads with better homology towards known piRNAs appear to occupy 4% of the total small RNA reads as compared to 11% being occupied by miRs
Summary
MiRNAs (miRs) are a class of small, non-coding RNAs, from 19–24 nt in length, that are produced by all animals and plants to regulate gene expression. Since the discovery of first miRs, lin-4 and let-7 from Caenoharbditis elegans [1, 2, 3] hundreds of miRs have been identified to PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0116988. More than 30,000 miRs have been identified from different species, such as Spodoptera litura [5], Bombyx mori, C. elegans, Arabidopsis thaliana and Homo sapiens, by either computational or experimental method and deposited in the miRBase [miRBase v19]. It has been estimated that, approximately 35–70% of different mRNA transcripts are regulated by miRs, with each miR potentially regulating hundreds of transcripts [15]
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