Cercis gigantea

In this study, C. gigantea miRNAs and their target genes were investigated by extracting RNA from young roots, tender stems, young leaves, and flower buds of C. gigantea to establish a small RNA (sRNA) library and a degradome library to further sequence. This study identified 194 known miRNAs belonging to 52 miRNA families and 23 novel miRNAs. Among the miRNA families, 158 miRNAs from 27 miRNA families were highly conserved and existed in a plurality of plants. In addition, 60 different targets for 30 known families and one target for novel miRNA were identified by high-throughput sequencing and degradome analysis in C. gigantea. Our analyses showed that conserved miRNAs have higher expression levels and more family members as well as more targets than other miRNAs. Meanwhile, these conserved miRNAs were found to be involved in auxin signal transduction, regulation of transcription, and other developmental processes in plants, which will help further understanding regulatory mechanisms of C. gigantea miRNAs. Overall design: The samples were collected from the young roots, tender shoots, young leaves and flower buds of wild C. gigantea growing in Jiangsu Province. TRIzol reagent (Invitrogen, USA) was used to extract the total RNAs [20]. An Illumina next-generation sequencing system, i.e. the 1 G Genome Analyzer sequencing platform, was utilized for sRNA sequencing. An Illumina HiSeq 2000 (LC Sciences, USA) was used for degradome sequencing.