Abiotic stress induced miRNA-TF-gene regulatory network: A structural perspective

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) and transcription factors (TFs) are the largest families of trans-acting gene regulatory species, which are pivotal players in a complex regulatory network. Recently, extensive research on miRNAs and TFs in agriculture has identified these trans-acting regulatory species, as an effective tool for engineering new crop cultivars to increase yield and quality as well tolerance to environmental stresses but our knowledge of regulatory network is still not sufficient to decipher the exact mechanism. In the current work, stress-specific TF-miRNA-gene network was built for Arabidopsis under drought, cold, salt and waterlogging stress using data from reliable publically available databases; and transcriptome and degradome sequence data analysis by meta-analysis approach. Further network analysis elucidated significantly dense, scale-free, small world and hierarchical backbone of interactions. The various centrality measures highlighted several genes/TF/miRNAs as potential targets for tolerant variety cultivation. This comprehensive regulatory information will accelerate the advancement of current understanding on stress specific transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulatory mechanism and has promising utilizations for experimental biologist who are intended to improve plant crop performance under multiple Abiotic stress environments.