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

Abstract

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.