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. 2019 Mar 23;20(6):1474.
doi: 10.3390/ijms20061474.

Bioinformatic Exploration of the Targets of Xylem Sap miRNAs in Maize under Cadmium Stress

Baoxiang Wang  1 , Dan Cheng  2 , Ziyan Chen  3 , Manman Zhang  4 , Guoqiang Zhang  5 , Mingyi Jiang  6 , Mingpu Tan  7
Affiliations

Bioinformatic Exploration of the Targets of Xylem Sap miRNAs in Maize under Cadmium Stress

Baoxiang Wang et al. Int J Mol Sci. .

Abstract

Cadmium (Cd) has the potential to be chronically toxic to humans through contaminated crop products. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) can move systemically in plants. To investigate the roles of long-distance moving xylem miRNAs in regulating maize response to Cd stress, three xylem sap small RNA (sRNA) libraries were constructed for high-throughput sequencing to identify potential mobile miRNAs in Cd-stressed maize seedlings and their putative targets in maize transcriptomes. In total, about 199 miRNAs (20⁻22 nucleotides) were identified in xylem sap from maize seedlings, including 97 newly discovered miRNAs and 102 known miRNAs. Among them, 10 miRNAs showed differential expression in xylem sap after 1 h of Cd treatment. Two miRNAs target prediction tools, psRNAtarget (reporting the inhibition pattern of cleavage) and DPMIND (discovering Plant MiRNA-Target Interaction with degradome evidence), were used in combination to identify, via bioinformatics, the targets of 199 significantly expressed miRNAs in maize xylem sap. The integrative results of these two bioinformatic tools suggested that 27 xylem sap miRNAs inhibit 34 genes through cleavage with degradome evidence. Moreover, nearly 300 other genes were also the potential miRNAs cleavable targets without available degradome data support, and the majority of them were enriched in abiotic stress response, cell signaling, transcription regulation, as well as metal handling. These approaches and results not only enhanced our understanding of the Cd-responsive long-distance transported miRNAs from the view of xylem sap, but also provided novel insights for predicting the molecular genetic mechanisms mediated by miRNAs.

Keywords: cadmium; maize; miRNAs; target gene; xylem sap.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Validation and comparison of the relative expression pattern of the selected eight small RNAs (sRNAs) between qRT–PCR and high-throughput small RNA sequencing.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Global view of metabolic pathway-embedded targets the predicted cleavable targets of maize xylem miRNAs.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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