Fig. 2: Changes at protein levels following inhibition of miRNA pathway in aestivation.

a Normalised gene expression of Pc-dicer-1 and Pc-drosha upon the feeding of chimeric dsDcr1/Dro, which simultaneously targeted both genes or control dsRNA, dsmGFP (n = 3, mean ± SEM, normalised to the respective gene expression in the dsmGFP group, comparison by Šídák’s test). b Percent miRNA in total small RNA measured through fragment analysis (n = 3, mean ± SEM, comparison by one-sided t-test). c Differentially abundant proteins in 15d-old (aestivating) dsDcr1/Dro-fed beetles in comparison to 15d-old dsmGFP fed beetles (n = 5). Proteins with log₂ fold change (FC) higher than 1 or lower than -1 in addition to an adjusted P below 0.05 were accepted as significantly increased or decreased in abundance. The differential abundance analysis on proteins quantified through LC/MS was conducted using Perseus (v1.4). d Differentially abundant proteins in 15d-old dsmGFP fed beetles in comparison to 5d-old (pre-aestivating) dsmGFP fed beetles (n = 5). e Venn diagram showing the overlap between proteins with increased abundance in 15d-old dsDcr1/Dro-fed beetles (c) and proteins with decreased abundance in 15d-old dsmGFP fed beetles (d) f The proteins significantly increased in abundance in dsDcr1/Dro-fed beetles were subjected to gene ontology (GO) enrichment analysis using clusterProfiler (v4.1). GO terms with P < 0.05 were accepted as significantly enriched.