Identification and Differential Expression of MicroRNAs during Cold Acclimation of the Tea Plant (Camellia sinensis) by Deep Sequencing

In this study, we performed deep sequencing and bioinformatics analyses of tea plant leaves to identify and characterize known and novel miRNAs. A total of 26,876,261 raw reads were produced from 2 libraries. We detected 422 known miRNAs belonging to 125 families, and 68 putative novel miRNAs. Overall design: The miRNA profiles of non-acclimated (CK, the date for sample collection was 1st December, 2010) and fully acclimated (CA1, the date was 29th December, 2010) were generated by deep sequencing, using Illumina Solexa.