Endogenous Small RNA Clusters in Plants

Abstract

In plants, small RNAs (sRNAs) usually refer to non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) with lengths of 20–24 nucleotides. sRNAs are involved in the regulation of many essential processes related to plant development and environmental responses. sRNAs in plants are mainly grouped into microRNAs (miRNAs) and small interfering RNAs (siRNAs), and the latter can be further classified into trans-acting siRNAs (ta-siRNAs), repeat-associated siRNAs (ra-siRNAs), natural anti-sense siRNAs (nat-siRNAs), etc. Many sRNAs exhibit a clustered distribution pattern in the genome. Here, we summarize the features and functions of cluster-distributed sRNAs, aimed to not only provide a thorough picture of sRNA clusters (SRCs) in plants, but also shed light on the identification of new classes of functional sRNAs.

Keywords

• Small RNA cluster
• MicroRNA
• siRNA
• Expression pattern