Weixi Song , Lifei Xia , Yiping Tian , Huibin Jiang , Yunnan Sun , Dehe Liu , Linbo Chen

1 Tea Research Institute, Yunnan Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Yunnan Engineering Research Center of Tea Germplasm Innovation and Matching Cultivation, Menghai, 666201, China
2 Yunnan Provincial Key Laboratory of Tea Science, Menghai, 666201, China
Author    Correspondence author
Genomics and Applied Biology, 2019, Vol. 10, No. 1   doi: 10.5376/gab.2019.10.0001
Received: 24 Sep., 2018    Accepted: 30 Oct., 2018    Published: 25 Jan., 2019

This article was first published in Genomics and Applied Biology (2018, 06: 2489-2497) in Chinese, and here was authorized to translate and publish the paper in English under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Song W.X., Xia L.F., Tian Y.P., Jiang H.B., Sun Y.N., Liu D.H., and Chen L.B., 2019, miRNA analysis of leaves of “Zijuan” tea (Camellia sinensis) based on high-throughput sequencing, Genomics and Applied Biology, 10(1): 1-9 (doi: 10.5376/gab.2019.10.0001)

“Zijuan” is specific tea resource with abundant secondary metabolites, like catechins, anthocyanins, flavonoids, etc. Its biosynthesis is a network of multiple metabolic pathways connected by associated nodes, which is controlled by a variety of structural and regulatory genes. MicroRNAs (miRNAs), as a non-coding RNAs, play important roles in plant growth, development and secondary metabolism by regulating gene expression. In this study, four independent miRNA libraries of bud, second-leaf, open surface leaf and mature-leaf of “Zijuan” tea were constructed and sequenced by high-throughput sequencing. 126 known miRNAs were identified and divided into 26 families, and 119 novel miRNAs were predicted. Based on the transcriptome data of “Zijuan” tea, 724 and 2,285 target genes were predicted for known and novel miRNAs, respectively. The predicted target genes were mostly transcription factors, which included MYB and bHLH transcription factors for regulating the biosynthesis of secondary metabolites -- anthocyanins and flavonoids. All the above results would provide a theoretical basis for further studies on miRNA regulating the development of tea leaf and the biosynthesis of secondary metabolites in Camellia sinensis.

“Zijuan” Camellia sinensis (L.); High-throughput sequencing; miRNA; Target genes