Abstract
Soybean oil is composed of fatty acids and glycerol. The content and composition of fatty acids partly determine the quality of soybean seeds. Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are endogenous non-coding RNAs that competitively bind to microRNAs (miRNAs) through miRNA recognition elements, thereby acting as sponges to regulate the expression of target genes. Although circRNAs have been identified previously in soybean, only their expression has been investigated without exploration of the competitive endogenous RNAs (ceRNAs) network of circRNAs-miRNAs-mRNAs. In this study, circRNAs in immature pods of a low linolenic acid soybean Mutant 72’ (MT72) and the wild-type control ‘Jinong 18’ (JN18) were systematically identified and analyzed at 30 and 40 days after flowering using high-throughput sequencing technology. We identified 6377 circRNAs, of which 114 were differentially expressed. Gene ontology and KEGG pathway analyses of targeted mRNAs in the ceRNAs network indicated that the differentially expressed circRNAs may be involved in fatty acid transport, suggesting that circRNAs may play a post-transcriptional regulatory role in soybean oil synthesis. This study provides a foundation for future exploration of the function of circRNAs in soybean and presents novel insights to guide further studies of plant circRNAs.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Robert McKenzie, PhD, from Liwen Bianji, Edanz Editing China (www.liwenbianji.cn/ac), for editing the English text of a draft of this manuscript.
Funding
This work was partially supported by the Department of Science and Technology of Jilin Province (no. 20180101266JC) and the 13th Five-Year Plan of Science and Technology Project of Jilin (grant no. JJKH20180641KJ).
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Conceptualization: MB. Formal analysis: LZ, WL. Data: HH, ZA, YW, LZ. Methodology: YD, ZJ, GS. Investigation: MB, ZQ, LS, QJ. Validation: MB, YW, LM. Funding acquisition: YD, LZ. Writing original draft: MB. Writing review and editing: MB, YD, ZJ. All authors have read and approved the final manuscript.
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Ma, B., Liu, Z., Yan, W. et al. Circular RNAs acting as ceRNAs mediated by miRNAs may be involved in the synthesis of soybean fatty acids. Funct Integr Genomics 21, 435–450 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10142-021-00791-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10142-021-00791-y