Identification and characterization of circular RNAs regulating genes responsible for drought stress tolerance in chickpea and soybean

Published on May 02, 2020 07:35 AM

With the development of efficient algorithms, it has become

feasible to unravel complex drought stress tolerance

mechanism in leguminous crops. Even though the role of

coding genes in drought stress tolerance mechanism is

known to certain extent, the role of non-coding RNAs

(ncRNAs) like circular RNAs (circRNAs) is unknown in

leguminous crops like chickpea and soybean. Hence, a study

has been taken up to predict the circular RNAs from the

transcriptomes of chickpea and soybean and to study the

circRNA-miRNA-mRNA interactions thereby identify the

endogenous target mimics (eTMs). The in silico results

revealed the presence of circRNAs in both the crop

transcriptomes and their differential expressions under

drought stress and control conditions. Besides, our

findings showed three predicted eTMs where circRNAs

acted as sponge for miRNAs that target genes like

Glyma.18G065200.1 in soybean and XM_004517122,

XM_027336693 in chickpea. The targeted genes are involved

in various drought stress responsive mechanism through

their activities in hormone signal transduction, response

to stress, response to auxin and transcription factor activity.

Keywords: Circular RNAs, drought stress, chickpea, soybean, Insilico prediction

Year: 2020
Volume: 80
Issue: 1
Article DOI: 10.31742/IJGPB.80.1.1
Print ISSN: 0019-5200
Online ISSN: 0975-6906

Tanwy Dasmandal, A. R. Rao and Sarika Sahu