Identification and functional analysis of drought responsive lncRNAs in tea plant

Abstract

Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are a class of non-coding RNAs that are more than 200 nucleotides in length. Emerging evidence suggest that lncRNAs by regulating gene expression can act as key regulators of diverse biological processes in plants. The identification of differentially expressed lncRNAs associated with drought tolerance/susceptibility is important to study and understand the complex regulation of drought responses of the tea plant. In this study, we identified 21,241 lncRNAs based on computational analysis of publicly available RNA-seq data of Camellia sinensis, among them 1395 lncRNAs were identified as drought specific. Some of these drought specific lncRNAs acts as target mimic of known mRNAs or putative targets for many already reported abiotic stress responsive microRNAs (miRNAs). One hundred and thirty two lncRNAs of tea were predicted to act as potential endogenous target mimics (eTMs) for 136 transcripts, which includes stress responsive transcription factors (TFs) such as GAMYB, RAP2–7 and MYC2. KEGG pathway analyses of the genes for which 132 lncRNAs act as eTMs showed highest number of genes in purine and thiamine metabolism pathways. This study gives an overview of the drought responsive lncRNAs and their possible functional roles in tea during drought stress conditions.