The impact of age, biogenesis, and genomic clustering on Drosophila microRNA evolution.

ABSTRACT: The molecular evolutionary signatures of miRNAs inform our understanding of their emergence, biogenesis, and function. The known signatures of miRNA evolution have derived mostly from the analysis of deeply conserved, canonical loci. In this study, we examine the impact of age, biogenesis pathway, and genomic arrangement on the evolutionary properties of Drosophila miRNAs. Crucial to the accuracy of our results was our curation of high-quality miRNA alignments, which included nearly 150 corrections to ortholog calls and nucleotide sequences of the global 12-way Drosophilid alignments currently available. Using these data, we studied primary sequence conservation, normalized free-energy values, and types of structure-preserving substitutions. We expand upon common miRNA evolutionary pattern

SUBMITTER: Mohammed J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3753935 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature