Abstract
MicroRNAs play important roles in posttranscriptional regulation of plant development, metabolism, and abiotic stress responses. The recent generation of massive amounts of small RNA sequence data, along with development of bioinformatic tools to identify miRNAs and their mRNA targets, has led to an explosion of newly identified putative miRNAs in plants. Genome editing techniques like CRISPR-Cas9 will allow us to study the biological role of these potential novel miRNAs by efficiently targeting both the miRNA and its mRNA target. In this chapter, we review bioinformatic tools and experimental methods for the identification and functional characterization of miRNAs and their target mRNAs in plants.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Cei Abreu-Goodger for comments on this manuscript. Research on miRNAs in the Gillmor laboratory is supported by grant CN-17-64 from the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States (UC MEXUS) and the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología de México (CONACyT).
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Armenta-Medina, A., Gillmor, C.S. (2019). An Introduction to Methods for Discovery and Functional Analysis of MicroRNAs in Plants. In: de Folter, S. (eds) Plant MicroRNAs. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1932. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-9042-9_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-9042-9_1
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