Analysis of Small RNA Sequencing Data in Plants

Abstract

Over the past decades, next-generation sequencing (NGS) has been employed extensively for investigating the regulatory mechanisms of small RNAs. Several bioinformatics tools are available for aiding biologists to extract meaningful information from enormous amounts of data generated by NGS platforms. This chapter describes a detailed methodology for analyzing small RNA sequencing data using different open source tools. We elaborate on various steps involved in analysis, from processing the raw sequencing reads to identifying miRNAs, their targets, and differential expression studies.