Abstract
BACKGROUND: In the context of early sowing of maize as a promising adaptation strategy that could significantly reduce the negative effects of climate change, an in-depth understanding of mechanisms underlying plant response to low-temperature stress is demanded. Although microRNAs (miRNAs) have been recognized as key regulators of plant stress response, research on their role in chilling tolerance of maize during early seedling stages is scarce. Therefore, it is of great significance to explore chilling-responsive miRNAs, reveal their expression patterns and associated target genes, as well as to examine the possible functions of the conserved and novel miRNAs. In this study, the role of miRNAs was examined in 5d-old maize seedlings of one tolerant and one sensitive inbred line exposed to chilling (10/8 °C) stress for 6 h and 24 h, by applying high throughput sequencing. RESULTS: A total of 145 annotated known miRNAs belonging to 30 families and 876 potentially novel miRNAs were identified. Differential expression (DE) analysis between control and stress conditions identified 98 common miRNAs for both genotypes at one time point and eight miRNAs at both time points. Target prediction and enrichment analysis showed that the DE zma-miR396, zma-miR156, zma-miR319, and zma-miR159 miRNAs modulate growth and development. Furthermore, it was found that several other DE miRNAs were involved in abiotic stress response: antioxidative mechanisms (zma-miR398), signal transduction (zma-miR156, zma-miR167, zma-miR169) and regulation of water content (zma-miR164, zma-miR394, zma-miR396). The results underline the zma-miRNAs involvement in the modulation of their target genes expression as an important aspect of the plant's survival strategy and acclimation to chilling stress conditions. CONCLUSIONS: To our understanding, this is the first study on miRNAs in 5-d old seedlings' response to chilling stress, providing data on the role of known and novel miRNAs post-transcriptional regulation of expressed genes and contributing a possible platform for further network and functional analysis.