FUNCTIONAL GENOMIC PROFILING OF DROUGHT RESPONSIVE MICRO RNA IN WHEAT

Abstract

This study was carried out at the Department of Genetics, Faculty of Agriculture, Ain shams University and the Environmental Stress Laboratory (ESL) at Agriculture Genetic Engineering Research Institute (AGERI), Agriculture Research Center (ARC), Giza, Egypt, during the period from 2014 to 2017. It aimed to study and correlate between ten miRNAs and drought tolerance in Egyptian hexaploid wheat cultivar (G168). The ten miRNAs were selected based on previous studies showed alterations of these miRNAs in response to drought stress and their names were according to miRBase database version 21. Seedling plants were treated with PEG 6000 to induce drought tolerance mechanisms and samples were collected before treatment (control), after treatment by two hours (Treatment 1) and after 12 hours treatment (Treatment 2). The expressions of miRNAs were studied using stem-loop reverse transcription combined with qPCR. Six RNA-sequencing data for the same cultivar and treatment were analyzed to correlate the expression of miRNA with their targets. Further, in silico analysis was made including, target prediction,