miR171 Family Members are Involved in Drought Response in Solanum tuberosum

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a group of small non-coding RNAs found in both animals and plants. miRNAs function as negative post-transcriptional regulators during plant development and in response to biotic and abiotic stress. In this work, we identified drought stress-related miRNAs from reads obtained from second-generation sequencing. This method is useful to determine miRNA expression profiles when genomic sequences are not available and to find putative miRNAs by aligning reads with sequences from miRBase. Here, we report the identification of a family of drought-responsive miRNAs, stu-miR171a, stu-miR171b, and stu-miR171c, from potato plants, their expression profiles upon drought stress, and their target mRNAs.