title: MicroRNAs As Potential Targets for Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Plants.
abstract: The microRNAs (miRNAs) are small (20-24 nt) sized, non-coding, single stranded riboregulator RNAs abundant in higher organisms. Recent findings have established that plants assign miRNAs as critical post-transcriptional regulators of gene expression in sequence-specific manner to respond to numerous abiotic stresses they face during their growth cycle. These small RNAs regulate gene expression via translational inhibition. Usually, stress induced miRNAs downregulate their target mRNAs, whereas, their downregulation leads to accumulation and function of positive regulators. In the past decade, investigations were mainly aimed to identify plant miRNAs, responsive to individual or multiple environmental factors, profiling their expression patterns and recognizing their roles in stress responses and tolerance. Altered expressions of miRNAs implicated in plant growth and development have been reported in several plant species subjected to abiotic stress conditions such as drought, salinity, extreme temperatures, nutrient deprivation, and heavy metals. These findings indicate that miRNAs may hold the key as potential targets for genetic manipulations to engineer abiotic stress tolerance in crop plants. This review is aimed to provide recent updates on plant miRNAs, their biogenesis and functions, target prediction and identification, computational tools and databases available for plant miRNAs, and their roles in abiotic stress-responses and adaptive mechanisms in major crop plants. Besides, the recent case studies for overexpressing the selected miRNAs for miRNA-mediated enhanced abiotic stress tolerance of transgenic plants have been discussed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Botany, Prof. Ramkrishna More Arts, Commerce and Science College, Savitribai Phule Pune University Pune, India.
authors.forename: Varsha
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Shriram
authors.affiliation: Department of Biotechnology, Modern College of Arts, Science and Commerce, Savitribai Phule Pune University Pune, India.
authors.forename: Vinay
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Kumar
authors.affiliation: Molecular Biology and Genetic Engineering Section, Vasantdada Sugar Institute Pune, India.
authors.forename: Rachayya M
authors.initials: RM
authors.lastname: Devarumath
authors.affiliation: Department of Biotechnology, Modern College of Arts, Science and Commerce, Savitribai Phule Pune University Pune, India.
authors.forename: Tushar S
authors.initials: TS
authors.lastname: Khare
authors.affiliation: Division of Genetics and Plant Breeding, Faculty of Agriculture WADURA, Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology Kashmir, India.
authors.forename: Shabir H
authors.initials: SH
authors.lastname: Wani
keywords: abiotic stress; microRNA; post-transcriptional regulation; stress-responses; transgenics