Identification of Drought Related MicroRNAs in Rice Root at early stage

Bakhshi, Behnam; Bihamta, Mohmmad Reza; Hosseini Salekdeh, Ghasem; Tohidfar, Masoud

Identification of Drought Related MicroRNAs in Rice Root at early stage

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

¹ Department of Plant Breeding, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran,

² Professor, Department of Agronomy and Plant Breeding, College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, University of Tehran, Karaj, Iran,

³ Associate Professor, Department of Genomics, Agricultural Biotechnology Research Institute (ABRII), Karaj, Iran,

⁴ Associate Professor, Department of Tissue Culture and Genetic Engineering, Agricultural Biotechnology Research Institute (ABRII), Karaj, Iran.

Abstract

Drought stress is one of the most important abiotic stresses that deteriorates rice agriculture of Iran. One of the best ways to establish drought stress tolerance in plants is miRNA mediated post transcriptional gene regulation. MiRNAs are small 19-24 nt regulatory RNAs and play important role in regulating plant gene expression in biotic and abiotic stress. In this study, we selected five miRNAs for promoter analysis and evaluation of differential expression of them under drought stress in roots. Three of them including miR162, miR169 and miR172 are conserved in many plants and the others including miR1425 and miR1880 are rice specific miRNAs. In addition, upstream screening of MIRNA genes showed that upstream region of some MIRNA genes like MIR172 are enriched with important regulatory elements like DRE and ABRE. Quantitative Realtime-PCR was used in this study for analyzing differential expression of evaluated miRNAs. Studying the differential expression of miRNAs in roots under drought condition showed that miR169 was up-regulated but conversely, miR172 was down-regulated. The rest of miRNAs in our study did not show significant differential expression under drought stress. It can be concluded that NF-YA and AP2 as the most important target genes for miR169 and miR172 respectively can play critical roles in response to drought stress.
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Keywords