Study of the role regulatory RNAs in the control of flowering time in Arabidopsis thaliana

BELEN, FEDERICO; VEGETTI, ABELARDO; DOTTO, MARCELA

Buenos Aires

Otro; PLANT BIOLOGY LECTURES SERIES 2022; 2022

Previous studies from our group established that Arabidopsis mir394a mir394b double mutant plants exhibit an early flowering phenotype, which correlates with a lower expression of FLOWERING LOCUS C earlier in development and higher expression of the floral integrators FLOWERING LOCUS T and SUPPRESSOR OF OVEREXPRESSION OF CONSTANS 1. The double mutant plants harbor insertional mutations in each of the two MIR394 genes present in the Arabidopsis genome. Insertional mutation in MIR394B is located in the promoter region, where this gene overlaps with the 3' region of an uncharacterized lncRNA .This type of non-coding RNAs are defined as transcripts with more than 200 bp, which do not present protein coding capacity and have been shown to have roles in gene silencing, flowering time control, organogenesis in roots, photomorphogenesis, abiotic stress responses and reproduction. This novel lncRNA is a 310 bp transcript annotated in the Arabidopsis genome as part of the Araport11 project, and is located in the opposite strand and partially overlapping MIR394B gene. Through the integrated study of the miR394 pathway and this lncRNA we set out to elucidate its role in Arabidopsis development. Here we present our initial results on the characterization of this lncRNA through bioinformatic structural analysis and expression using RT-qPCR and RNA-seq datasets from Arabidopsis. Our results indicate this lncRNA exhibit low expression in leaves and a very low expression in the rest of the analyzed samples Moreover, we established that the insertional mutation affects mature miR394 accumulation, suggesting a possible relationship with the miR394 regulatory pathway and the control of flowering time.