Cold stress responsive microRNAs and their targets in Musa balbisiana

Abstract

Cold stress is an environmental factor affecting plant development and production. Recently, microRNAs (miRNAs) have been found to be involved in several plant processes such as growth regulation and stress responses. Although miRNAs and their targets have been identified in several banana species, their participation during cold accumulation in banana remains unknown. In this study, two small RNA libraries were generated from micropropagated plantlets of Musa balbisiana grown at normal and low temperature (5°C). A total of 69 known miRNAs and 32 putative novel miRNAs were detected in the libraries by Solexa sequencing. Sixty-four cold-inducible miRNAs were identified through differentially expressed miRNAs analysis. Among 43 miRNAs belonging to 26 conserved miRNA families with altered expression, 18 were upregulated and 25 downregulated under cold stress. Of 21 putative novel miRNAs with altered expression, four were downregulated and 17 upregulated. Furthermore, eight miRNAs were validated by stem-loop qRT-PCR and their dynamic differential expression was analyzed. In addition, 393 target genes of 58 identified cold-responsive miRNAs were predicted and categorized by function. These results provide important information for further characterization and functional analysis of cold-responsive miRNAs in banana.

Keywords

cold stress / microRNA / Musa balbisiana

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31501043), the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China (2011AA10020605), and the Earmarked Fund for Modern Agro-industry Technology Research System (CARS-32).

Supplementary materials

The online version of this article at http://dx.doi.org/10.15302/J-FASE-2016121 contains supplementary materials (Appendix A).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Jingyi Wang, Juhua Liu, Caihong Jia, Hongxia Miao, Jianbin Zhang, Zhuo Wang, Biyu Xu, and Zhiqiang Jin declare they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose.

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2016. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)