Identification and Characterization of microRNAs from Eugenia uniflora

The microRNAs (miRNAs) are endogenous small RNAs that play essential regulatory roles in plant growth, development and stress response. For this reason, extensive studies of miRNAs have been performed in model plants and other plants of economic importance in the last years. This study corresponds to the first description of microRNAs in a specie from the Myrtaceae family without availability of genomic resources. A library of small RNAs from leaves of Eugenia uniflora, a specie with pharmacological and ecological importance, was sequenced with the Illumina technology. A total of 12,759,506 reads with high quality were obtained and analyzed to identify conserved and non-conserved miRNAs. We found 1,852,722 reads representing 45 conserved miRNAs families with miR167 being the most abundant family. Further analysis using contigs assembled from 16,765,767 reads from an Illumina mRNA sequencing of leaves of E. uniflora allowed the prediction of secondary structures of 25 conserved miRNAs and 17 non-conserved miRNAs. We are currently involved in identifying the targets of the described miRNAs in the present study and verifying their levels of expression in different tissues.