http://www.abbs.info E-mail: [email protected]
ISSN
1672-9145
Acta Biochim Biophys Sin
2005, 37(2): 75–87
CN 31-1940/Q
Computational
Identification of Novel Family Members of MicroRNA Genes in Arabidopsis thaliana and Oryza sativa
Yang LI, Wei LI, and You-Xin JIN*
State Key Laboratory of Molecular
Biology, Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Shanghai Institutes for
Biological Sciences,
Chinese Academy of Sciences,
Shanghai 200031, China
Abstract MicroRNAs (miRNAs)
are a class of endogenous small RNAs that play important regulatory roles in
both animals and plants. miRNA genes have been intensively studied in animals,
but not in plants. In this study, we adopted a homology search approach to
identify homologs of previously validated plant miRNAs in Arabidopsis
thaliana and Oryza sativa. We identified 20 potential miRNA genes in
Arabidopsis and 40 in O. sativa, providing a relatively complete
enumeration of family members for these miRNAs in plants. In addition, a
greater number of Arabidopsis miRNAs (MIR168, MIR159 and MIR172) were
found to be conserved in rice. With the novel homologs, most of the miRNAs have
closely related fellow miRNAs and the number of paralogs varies in the
different miRNA families. Moreover, a probable functional segment highly conserved
on the elongated stem of pre-miRNA fold-backs of MIR319 and MIR159 family was
identified. These results support a model of variegated miRNA regulation in
plants, in which miRNAs with different functional elements on their pre-miRNA
fold-backs can differ in their function or regulation, and closely related
miRNAs can be diverse in their specificity or competence to downregulate target
genes. It appears that the sophisticated regulation of miRNAs can achieve
complex biological effects through qualitative and quantitative modulation of
gene expression profiles in plants.
Key words
microRNA; post-transcriptional gene silencing; rice; Arabidopsis
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Received: September 8,
2004
Accepted: December 14, 2004
This work was supported by the
grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 30430210)
and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (No. KSCX-2-2-04)
*Corresponding author: Tel,
86-21-54921222; Fax, 86-21-54921011; E-mail, [email protected]