Computational prediction and characterization of miRNA from coconut leaf transcriptome

Abstract

Micro RNAs (miRNAs) are single stranded, small and non-coding endogenous RNA molecules, which control the gene expression at the post-transcriptional level either by suppression or degradation. Because of its highly conserved nature, in silico methods can be employed to predict novel miRNAs in plant species. By using previously known plant miRNAs available at miRBase, we predicted 16 miRNAs, which belongs to 11 miRNA families, and also targets for seven potential miRNAs in coconut leaf transcriptome. A majority of these seem to encode transcription factors. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of in silico prediction and characterization of miRNA from coconut. These findings form an useful resource for future research into miRNA prediction and function prediction in coconut and for studies on their experimental validation and functional analyses.