miSolRNA: A tomato micro RNA relational database

BAZZINI, A; ASIS, R; GONZALEZ, V; BASSI, S; CONTE, M; SORIA, M; FERNIE, A; ASURMENDI, S; CARRARI, F

BMC PLANT BIOLOGY

BIOMED CENTRAL LTD

Año: 2010 vol. 10 p. 1 - 7

1471-2229

Background: The economic importance of Solanaceae plant species is well documented and tomato has becomea model for functional genomics studies. In plants, important processes are regulated by microRNAs (miRNA).Description: We describe here a data base integrating genetic map positions of miRNA-targeted genes, theirexpression profiles and their relations with quantitative fruit metabolic loci and yield associated traits. miSolRNAprovides a metadata source to facilitate the construction of hypothesis aimed at defining physiological modes ofaction of regulatory process underlying the metabolism of the tomato fruit.Conclusions: The MiSolRNA database allows the simple extraction of metadata for the proposal of new hypothesisconcerning possible roles of miRNAs in the regulation of tomato fruit metabolism. It permits i) to map miRNAs andtheir predicted target sites both on expressed (SGN-UNIGENES) and newly annotated sequences (BAC sequencesreleased), ii) to co-locate any predicted miRNA-target interaction with metabolic QTL found in tomato fruits, iii) toretrieve expression data of target genes in tomato fruit along their developmental period and iv) to design furtherexperiments for unresolved questions in complex trait biology based on the use of genetic materials that havebeen proven to be a useful tools for map-based cloning experiments in Solanaceae plant species.