Abstract
To understand the expansion of multicopy microRNA (miRNA) families in plants, we localized the reported miRNA genes from Arabidopsis and rice to their chromosomes, respectively, and observed that 37% of 117 miRNA genes from Arabidopsis and 35% of 173 miRNA genes from rice were segmental duplications in the genome. In order to characterize whether the expression diversification has occurred among plant multicopy miRNA family members, we designed PCR primers targeting 48 predicted miRNA precursors from 10 families in Arabidopsis and rice. Results from RT-PCR data suggest that the transcribed precursors of members within the same miRNA family were present at different expression levels. In addition, although miR160 and miR162 sequences were conserved in Arabidopsis and rice, we found that the expression patterns of these genes differed between the two species. These data suggested that expression diversification has occurred in multicopy miRNA families, increasing our understanding of the expression regulation of miRNAs in plants.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge Prof Hervá Vaucheret for kindly supplying the ago1-27 mutant and Dr Xuemei Chen for helpful suggestions and reviewing this manuscript. This work was supported by the Fund of National Key Basic Research Developments Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology China (2001CB109002), National Natural Science Foundation of China (30370893) and Shanghai Municipal Committee of Science and Technology (03JC14061), the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (NCET-04-0403), and the ShuGuang Scholarship (04SG15).
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Jiang, D., Yin, C., Yu, A. et al. Duplication and expression analysis of multicopy miRNA gene family members in Arabidopsis and rice. Cell Res 16, 507–518 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.cr.7310062
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.cr.7310062
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