Identification and characterization of cold responsive microRNAs in tea plant (Camellia sinensis) based on high-throughput sequencing and their targets using degradome analysis [microarray]

Solexa sequencing technology was used to perform high throughput sequencing of the small RNA library from the cold treatment of tea leaves. Subsequently, aligning these sequencing date with plant known miRNAs, we characterized 112 C. sinensis conserved miRNAs. In addition, 215 potential candidate miRNAs were found; among them, 131 candidates with star sequence were chosen as novel miRNAs. There are both congruously and differently regulated miRNAs, and line-specific miRNAs were identified by microarray-based hybridization in response to cold stress. The miRNA chip included 3228 miRNA probes corresponding to miRNA transcripts listed in Sanger miRBase release 19.0 and 283 novel miRNAs probes founding in tea plant. In the study presented here, two tea plant cultivars, ‘Yingshuang’ (YS, a cold-tolerant tea plant cultivar) and ‘Baiye 1’ (BY, a cold-sensitive tea plant cultivar), were kept at 4°C for 4,12, 24 h, respectively, and 28°C for as control. These samples were used to acquire expression profiles of a total of 3,511 unique genes, leading to the successful construction of supervised