Project description:The pink-flowered strawberry is very popular in China due to its appreciation and economic benefits and its flower has rich red petal with varying degrees, which is provided by anthocyanins accumulation. To better understand the functions of miRNAs, sRNAome, transcriptome and degradome sequencing were used to explore the target genes of miRNAs in flower development and coloring of pink-flowered strawberry. Nine small RNA libraries and a mixed degradome library from flower petals at different developmental stages were constructed and sequenced in this study. A total of 739 known miRNAs and 964 newly identified miRNAs were identified via small RNA sequencing, and their 2816 target genes were cleaved by 639 miRNAs based on the degradome data. There were 317 different expression miRNAs among flower development in pink-flowered strawberry regulated 2134 different expression target genes, which significantly enriched in the transcriptional regulation, phenylpropanoid biosynthesis and plant hormone signal transduction. Furthermore, integrated microRNAomic and transcriptomic analyses suggested that 98 miRNAs were targeted several transcription factors related to anthocyanin accumulation, in which 26 were targeted to MYBs, 12 bHLHs, 14 NACs, and 19 SPLs. And that, twenty seven different expression miRNAs may affect anthocyanin biosynthesis by regulating 23 targets participated in hormone signal transduction pathway in pink-flowered strawberry. The qRT-PCR analysis confirmed the expression changes of 21 miRNA-target pairs showed an opposite trend. Moreover, a co-expression regulatory network was constructed based on differentially expressed miRNA-targets according to the degradome data. Overall, we conducted a comparative analysis uncovered the regulatory functions of microRNAs in flower development and color changes of pink-flowered strawberry via multiple factors, including anthocyanin biosynthesis, hormone signaling and regulation factors. This work not only expands the knowledge of miRNAs affecting the coloration in strawberry, but also provides rich resources for future functional studies.
Project description:With the development of high throughput sequencing technologies, plenty of non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) have been discovered to play important roles in diverse plant biological processes. Although these ncRNAs extensively exist in plant, their biological functions are still remained to characterize. To obtain a comprehensive understanding of long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) function in strawberry fruit ripening progress, we performed transcriptomic analyses on the diploid strawberry Fragaria vesca in a time-course during fruit ripening. Here, we have identified 25,613 lncRNAs based on RNA-seq data from poly(A)-depleted libraries and rRNA-depleted libraries. Among them, most of lncRNAs exhibit stage-specific expression pattern. Functional analysis on F.vesca endogenous FRUIT RIPENING-RELATED LONG ANTISENSE INTERGENIC RNA (FRILAIR) in octaploid strawberry Falandi, we found that overexpression FRILAIR can compete miR397 to regulate its target laccase genes (LACs), and it may contribute to strawberry ripening. Our findings demonstrate that FRILAIR can act as a competing endogenous RNA (ceRNA) by disturbing miR397 to repress expression level of LACs, and would be valuable for strawberry ripening.