Study of a functional pathway of miRNAs target genes in response to drought ant salt stresses in canola

There is much information about the regulation of gene expression in response to various stresses at the transcriptional level. Nevertheless, there is limited information about this process at the post-transcriptional level. The diversity and complexity of miRNA regulation indicates their importance in biological processes. Many miRNA regulatory modules can form a complex miRNA-mRNA regulatory network. Therefore, research on miRNA-mRNA regulatory networks can provide valuable information for understanding complex biological processes. These data are very important to further study the stress tolerance mechanisms in plants, especially in rapeseed. In this research, the selection of miRNAs related to drought and salinity stress was made by reviewing the articles on abiotic stresses. Then the target genes were identified using the sequences of mature miRNAs and psRNATarget online software. A gene list of 225 identified target genes was prepared using the UniProt database. Their functional pathway was identified utilizing the DAVID bioinformatics database and KEGG database according to default parameters. Investigations showed that these target genes were involved in several biological pathways including ribosome, spliceosome, proteasome, purine metabolism, selenocompound metabolism, and sulfur metabolism. In addition, the STRING database was used to check co-expression genes. Our result indicated the existence of 37 co-expression genes among the identified target genes.