Analysis of plant-derived miRNAs in animal small RNA datasets

BMC Genomics

Research Article

Sergey Ivashuta¹  Yuanji Zhang¹  B Elizabeth Wiggins¹  Jay Petrick²  Christina Lawrence²  Greg Heck² 

[1] Chesterfield Village Research Center, Monsanto Company, 700 Chesterfield Parkway, 63017, North Chesterfield, MO, USA;St. Louis – World Headquarters, Monsanto Company, 800 North Lindbergh Blvd, 63167, St. Louis, MO, USA;

关键词: Plant miRNA;    Animal small RNA datasets;    RNAi;    miR168;    Aphid;    Corn ear worm;    Corn rootworm;    Fall army worm;    Silkworm;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2164-13-381

 received in 2012-06-10, accepted in 2012-07-31,  发布年份 2012

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundPlants contain significant quantities of small RNAs (sRNAs) derived from various sRNA biogenesis pathways. Many of these sRNAs play regulatory roles in plants. Previous analysis revealed that numerous sRNAs in corn, rice and soybean seeds have high sequence similarity to animal genes. However, exogenous RNA is considered to be unstable within the gastrointestinal tract of many animals, thus limiting potential for any adverse effects from consumption of dietary RNA. A recent paper reported that putative plant miRNAs were detected in animal plasma and serum, presumably acquired through ingestion, and may have a functional impact in the consuming organisms.ResultsTo address the question of how common this phenomenon could be, we searched for plant miRNAs sequences in public sRNA datasets from various tissues of mammals, chicken and insects. Our analyses revealed that plant miRNAs were present in the animal sRNA datasets, and significantly miR168 was extremely over-represented. Furthermore, all or nearly all (>96%) miR168 sequences were monocot derived for most datasets, including datasets for two insects reared on dicot plants in their respective experiments. To investigate if plant-derived miRNAs, including miR168, could accumulate and move systemically in insects, we conducted insect feeding studies for three insects including corn rootworm, which has been shown to be responsive to plant-produced long double-stranded RNAs.ConclusionsOur analyses suggest that the observed plant miRNAs in animal sRNA datasets can originate in the process of sequencing, and that accumulation of plant miRNAs via dietary exposure is not universal in animals.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Zhang et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2012. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.