Identification and Differential Expression of MicroRNAs during Cold Acclimation of the Tea Plant (Camellia sinenesis) by Deep Sequencing
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of small non-protein-coding RNAs generated from single-stranded precursors with unique hairpin structures. Lots of experiments have demonstrated that miRNAs play important role in multiple biological and metabolic processes in plants, such as response to environmental abiotic stress. Tea plant is an evergreen woody plants. As perennial plants, during its whole life-cycles, low temperature is one of the most important environment stresses that limited its growth, survival and geographical distribution. Tea plant can enhance its freezing tolerance after exposure to a period of low, non-freezing temperatures. This process is so-called cold acclimation (CA) . When tea plant passed through CA, some important adaptive modifications were happened in the cellular, physiological, metabolic and molecular levels. Compared to other model plants, the number of predicted tea plant miRNAs is quite low. In order to screening the miRNAs in tea plant, we used high-throughput sequencing technology to identify the conserved and novel miRNAs in tea plant, and to study the expression pattern of some miRNAs during cold acclimation of tea plant.