Identification and comparative analysis of drought-associated microRNAs in two cowpea genotypes

BMC Plant Biology

Research Article

Jeffrey D Ehlers¹  Renyi Liu¹  Philip A Roberts¹  Ndeye N Diop¹  Zhigang Wu¹  Timothy J Close¹  Lei Gao¹  Blanca E Barrera-Figueroa²  Jian-Kang Zhu³ 

[1] Department of Botany and Plant Sciences, University of California, 92521, Riverside, CA, USA;Department of Botany and Plant Sciences, University of California, 92521, Riverside, CA, USA;Departamento de Biotecnologia, Universidad del Papaloapan, 68301, Tuxtepec Oaxaca, Mexico;Department of Botany and Plant Sciences, University of California, 92521, Riverside, CA, USA;Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture, Purdue University, 47907, West Lafayette, IN, USA;

关键词: Drought Stress;    Drought Tolerance;    miRNA Family;    miRNA Gene;    Mature miRNAs;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2229-11-127

 received in 2011-06-09, accepted in 2011-09-17,  发布年份 2011

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundCowpea (Vigna unguiculata) is an important crop in arid and semi-arid regions and is a good model for studying drought tolerance. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are known to play critical roles in plant stress responses, but drought-associated miRNAs have not been identified in cowpea. In addition, it is not understood how miRNAs might contribute to different capacities of drought tolerance in different cowpea genotypes.ResultsWe generated deep sequencing small RNA reads from two cowpea genotypes (CB46, drought-sensitive, and IT93K503-1, drought-tolerant) that grew under well-watered and drought stress conditions. We mapped small RNA reads to cowpea genomic sequences and identified 157 miRNA genes that belong to 89 families. Among 44 drought-associated miRNAs, 30 were upregulated in drought condition and 14 were downregulated. Although miRNA expression was in general consistent in two genotypes, we found that nine miRNAs were predominantly or exclusively expressed in one of the two genotypes and that 11 miRNAs were drought-regulated in only one genotype, but not the other.ConclusionsThese results suggest that miRNAs may play important roles in drought tolerance in cowpea and may be a key factor in determining the level of drought tolerance in different cowpea genotypes.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Barrera-Figueroa et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2011. 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.