IDENTIFICATION OF IN SILICO MIRNAS IN FOUR PLANT SPECIES FROM FABACEAE FAMILY

Abstract

Plant microRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNAs, about 21-24 nucleotides,
which have critical regulatory roles on growth, development, metabolic and
defense processes. Their identification, together with their targets, have gained
importance in exploring their parts on functional context, providing a better
understanding of their regulatory roles in critical biological processes. With the
advent of next-generation sequencing technologies and newly developed
bioinformatics tools, the identification of microRNA studies by computational
methods has been increasing. In the presented study, we identified some putative
miRNAs for Cicer arietinum, Glycine max, Medicago truncatula and Phaseolus
vulgaris genomes. We also provided the similarity between those organisms
regarding common/different miRNAs availability throughout their genomes.
According to the data, the highest similarity was found between Glycine max and
Phaseolus vulgaris. We also investigated the potential targets of putatively
identified miRNAs for each organism. We analyzed which miRNA families were
expressed in silico. We also showed the representation (copy number of genes)
profile of predicted putative miRNAs for each organism. Since most of the food
products and animal feeds consist of Fabaceae family members as it is mentioned
above, these findings might help to elucidate their metabolic and regulatory
pathways to use them efficiently in biotechnological applications and breeding
programs.