Identification and characterization of conserved miRNAs with its targets mRNA in Trichinella Spiralis

Abstract

microRNAs (Small regulatory non-coding RNAs) have an important role in gene regulation and evolutionarily conserved molecules. Trichinella spiralis infect majority of species. Therefore, it is of interest to identify conserved miRNAs and their targets using sequences from EST, GSS and full length nucleotides obtained from NCBI against previously reported worm miRNAs. We identify 11 novel miRNAs in T. spiralis by using bioinformatics-homology based search. In addition, we predicted target mRNA genes form complementary base pair in seed region of miRNAs. Further, gene annotation using Uniprot shows that these target genes of miRNAs are involved in various metabolism, enzymatic activity and constituents of membrane components. Background: MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are endogenous small, single stranded, non-coding RNA (~19-25 nucleotides) molecules that regulate gene expression at post-transcriptional level either by mRNA cleavage or repressing translation [1, 2]. Larger number of miRNAs have been identified and characterized in various organisms such as animals, plants, viruses and in parasites [3-5]. miRNA sequences are highly conserved across the species [6, 7]. Therefore, it is of interest to identify and characterize conserved miRNA in T. spiralis by using computational analysis.