Jin Zhou , Minli Xu

Hainan Provincial Key Laboratory of Crop Molecular Breeding, Sanya, 572025, Hainan, China
Author    Correspondence author
Computational Molecular Biology, 2025, Vol. 15, No. 5   
Received: 11 Jul., 2025    Accepted: 22 Aug., 2025    Published: 13 Sep., 2025

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Drought stress is one of the main abiotic factors restricting corn production worldwide. microRNA (miRNA), as a key post-transcriptional regulatory factor, plays a significant role in the process of plants responding to adverse stress. This study utilized deep sequencing technology and network analysis methods to systematically identify miRNAs in corn that respond to drought stress, analyze their regulatory network mechanisms, and construct miRNA expression profiles of corn seedlings under drought treatment and normal irrigation conditions through high-throughput small RNA sequencing technology. A total of 312 known mirnas and 74 newly predicted mirnas were identified, among which 51 were significantly differentially expressed under drought stress. Further, the target genes were predicted through bioinformatics methods, and GO annotation and KEGG pathway enrichment analysis were conducted. The results showed that these mirnas were mainly involved in biological processes such as plant hormone signal transduction (such as the ABA pathway), oxidative stress response, and transcriptional regulation. This study comprehensively depicted the miRNA map of corn in response to drought stress and established a mirNA-mediated gene regulatory network framework, providing a theoretical basis for in-depth understanding of the molecular mechanism of corn drought resistance and potential target resources for molecular design breeding.

Corn (Zea mays); Drought stress; microRNA (miRNA); Deep sequencing; Gene regulatory network