Project description:microRNAs(miRNAs) play critical regulatory roles mainly through cleaving targeted mRNAs or repressing gene translation during plant developments. Grapevine is amongst the most economically important fruit crops with whole genome available, and the study on grapevine miRNAs (Vv-miRNAs) have also been emphasized. However, the regulation mode of Vv-miRNAs on their target mRNAs during grapevine development has not been studied well, especially on a transcriptome-wide level. Here, six small RNA (sRNA) and mRNA libraries from various grapevine tissues were constructed for Illumina and Degradome sequencing. Subsequently, the spatiotemporal variation in the Vv-miRNAs’ regulation on their target genes was systematically analyzed. Totally, 242 known and 132 novel Vv-miRNAs were identified, and 193 target mRNAs including 103 for known and 90 for novel miRNAs were validated in one or more of tissues examined. The interesting finding was that over 50% of novel miRNAs were expressed exclusively in flowers or berries where they had tissue-specific cleavage roles on their target genes, especially, the breadth of their cleavage sites in flower tissues. Moreover, six novel miRNAs in berries were found to response to exogenous gibberellin (GA) and/or ethylene by real time RT-PCR (qRT-PCR) analysis, confirming their regulatory functions during berry development. Other finding was that about 93.6% of the known miRNAs possessed the high conservation in various tissues where their expression levels exhibited some dynamic variations during grapevine development. Significantly, it was found the phenomena that some Vv-miRNA families exist one key member that act as the main regulator of their target genes during grapevine development.
