Repetitive Sequences in Monocot MICRORNAs – Targets for Future Bioengineering Strategies for Climate Resilient Crops

Abstract

miRNAs are a de novo class of endogenous, small, non-coding RNAs (19–21 nucleotides long) that are evolutionarily conserved and have a direct impact on the processes of development, differentiation, growth, metabolism, and disease resistance. Micro (mi)RNAs having high base- pair complementarity exert their effect by post-transcriptional silencing of targets. miRNAs functions by acting upon target mRNA induce cleavage and subsequent degradation of it. Further more, they can also repress the translational targets. mRNA deadenylation and their subsequent degradation is caused by the induction of translational repression of miRNAs in animals. Plant miRNA not only differ in their mechanism of gene regulation but they also differ from biogenesis point of view. Majority of the miRNAs function as negative switches to control the expression of important genes, like transcription factors, which affects how the body reacts to stress and during development. With the impact of climate change the mean average temperatures are on the rise. Thus, the need of the hour is to identify or develop crops that can be grown in areas even under above normal temperatures. For this the microRNA regulatory pathways offers us with the necessary tweaking cascade that can be explored further. This work focuses on the identification of internal repeats in microRNA sequences which not only enables us to identify and map the occurrence of the specific molecules but also enables us to formulate methods for their regulation. Results indicate that there is a strong correlation between the occurrence of internal repeats and miRNA stability.