College of Life Science, Nanjing Agricultural University, Weigang 1, Nanjing 210095, China.
Metallomics. 2013 Sep;5(9):1184-90. doi: 10.1039/c3mt00022b.
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) regulate plant growth and development by silencing gene expression at post-transcriptional level. Recent studies have shown that miRNAs are the regulators of plant response to environmental stresses. Also, genome-wide profiling of small RNAs reveals that many miRNAs are in response to heavy metals. Identification of the targets of metal-regulated miRNAs demonstrated that most of the target genes are involved in diverse metabolic pathways including sulphate allocation and assimilation, phytohormone signalling, antioxidation, and miRNA biogenesis. Thus, the high-throughput sequencing of small RNAs provides a powerful tool for mining a number of known and unknown miRNAs in plants in response to metal stress. Here, we discuss recent studies focusing on the newly identified miRNAs and their potential targets in plants and propose a new scenario involving plant tolerance to metal toxicity as part of the dynamic network that defines the potential roles of miRNAs in plant adaptation to heavy metal stress.
微小 RNA（miRNA）通过在转录后水平沉默基因表达来调节植物的生长和发育。最近的研究表明，miRNA 是植物对环境胁迫反应的调节因子。此外，对小 RNA 的全基因组分析表明，许多 miRNA 对重金属有响应。金属调控 miRNA 的靶基因鉴定表明，大多数靶基因参与多种代谢途径，包括硫酸盐分配和同化、植物激素信号转导、抗氧化和 miRNA 生物发生。因此，小 RNA 的高通量测序为挖掘植物对金属胁迫响应的大量已知和未知 miRNA 提供了有力工具。在这里，我们讨论了最近的研究集中在新鉴定的 miRNA 及其在植物中的潜在靶基因上，并提出了一个新的情景，涉及植物对金属毒性的耐受性，作为定义 miRNA 在植物适应重金属胁迫中的潜在作用的动态网络的一部分。
