Alteration of tomato microRNAs expression during fruit development upon Cucumber mosaic virus and Tomato aspermy virus infection

Abstract

The economic importance of Solanaceae plant species is well documented, and tomato has become a model for fleshy fruit development and ripening studies. Plant microRNAs (miRNAs) are small endogenous RNAs that are involved in a variety of activities including plant development, signal transduction and protein degradation, as well as response to environment stress and pathogen invasion. Here in this study, we aimed at quantifying the expression alterations of nine miRNAs and target mRNAs in tomato flower and fruit development upon Cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) and Tomato aspermy virus infections. Three different CMV strains CMV-Fny, CMV-FnyΔ2b and CMV-Fny-satT1 were used in our investigation, and the miRNA/mRNA expression alterations were analyzed by real-time quantitative RT-PCR. The results shown the levels of several miRNA/mRNA pairs were increased upon virus infections. However, the increased level of individual miRNA differed for different virus strains, reflecting differences in severity of symptom phenotypes. The altered expression patterns of these miRNA/mRNA pairs and their predicted functions indicate the possible roles in flower and fruit development, and provide experimental data for understanding the miRNA-mediated phenotype alterations in tomato fruit.

The advance of tomato disease-related microRNAs

“…Meanwhile, the phenotype of 2b deleted CMV-infected tomato was similar to that of mock, and even displayed general growth promotion. The observation demonstrates the essential role of CMV 2b in perturbing host miRNA pathway and immunity (Cillo et al 2009;Feng et al 2011Feng et al , 2012Feng et al , 2013a.…”

“…MiR156/157 was downregulated in Potato spindle tuber viroid (PSTVd)-infected tomato, leading to the strong symptoms of stunting and dwarfing (Diermann et al 2010;Tsushima et al 2015). Hence, it is concluded that miR156/157 may be in charge When inoculated with CMV, miR159 was downregulated in leaves (Lang et al 2011), while up-regulated in early bud and flower time in tomato seedlings (Feng et al 2013a). The conserved miR159 was validated to target Myeloblastosis (MYB) TF (Palatnik et al 2003), playing crucial regulatory roles in plant development.…”

“…Under CMV and TAV infection, miR172 had an abnormal expression profile in bud and anthesis, whereas miR167 was induced in open flower and green fruit of tomato (Feng et al 2013a). Indeed, it was reported that miR172 controlled flowering timing and floral morphology by targeting Apetala2 (AP2) (Aukerman and Sakai 2003;Chuck et al 2009;Zhu and Helliwell 2011).…”

Potato cultivar Etola exhibits hypersensitive resistance to PVYNTN and partial resistance to PVYZ‐NTN and PVYN‐Wi strains and strain‐specific alterations of certain host miRNAs might correlate with symptom severity

“…(). Although miR168 is up‐regulated by virus infection in a plant‐ and virus‐independent manner, many miRNAs and their targets respond to viral infection differently depending on virus, virus strain type, plant species and tissue type (Cillo et al ., ; Feng et al ., , ; Du et al ., ). The symptoms caused by viral infection might be, in part, the consequence of misregulation of host miRNAs (Kasschau et al ., ; Naqvi et al ., ; Xu et al ., ).…”

Identification of Stress Associated microRNAs in Solanum lycopersicum by High-Throughput Sequencing

“…Then, most miRNAs are loaded onto ARGONAUTE 1 (AGO1), which lies at the core of RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC) to target coding RNAs by sequence complementarity [11]. As a result, target gene expression is repressed through translational inhibition and/or RNA cleavage [9,12]. In plants, it has been shown that most target transcripts only contain one perfectly complementary site of a single miRNA located anywhere along the target mRNA instead of at the 3′-UTR as in animals [13], and base-pairing leads to degradation of the target mRNA by site-specific cleavage [8].…”