利用Solexa测序技术鉴定龙眼体胚发生过程中的miRNAs

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play important regulatory roles in various biological and metabolic processes by negatively modulating gene expression at the post-transcriptional level. Plant embryo development is a complex process, whcih must be exist a large number of specific miRNAs expression. However, to date, no systematic studies of small RNA in plant embryo development have been conducted, and there is no report about longan somatic embryo miRNAs.In this study, to investigate the number of miRNAs related to embryogenesis in longan and what features these miRNAs exhibit, Solexa sequecing technology was employed to identify miRNAs from a short RNA library generated from synchronized longan embryogenic cultures at different developmental stages. Solexa sequencing showed that longan has a complex small RNA population and the length of small RNAs varied, 24 nt being the predominant. 12, 554, 858 reads produced 13,151 unique miRNAs representing 367 conserved miRNAs as well as 23 novel poential miRNAs were obtained. The expression patterns of different unique sRNAs during the development of longan somatic embyrogenesis varied drastically, and most of them were at the low levels; Specifically, potential target genes were predicted for some conserved miRNAs based on sequence homology search. This research provides a first large scale cloning and characterization of plants(longan) somatic embryogenesis related miRNAs. The newly identified miRNAs greatly enrich the repertoire of somatic embryo miRNAs and provide insights into miRNA biogenesis and expression in plant somatic embryo development.