sequence fingerprints of microrna conservation微rna序列指纹的保护.pdfVIP

Sequence Fingerprints of MicroRNA Conservation 1,2 1 2 Bing Shi *, Wei Gao , Juan Wang * 1 Department of Cardiology, Peking University Third Hospital, Beijing, China, 2 Department of Biomedical Informatics, Peking University Health Science Center, Beijing, China Abstract It is known that the conservation of protein-coding genes is associated with their sequences both various species, such as animals and plants. However, the association between microRNA (miRNA) conservation and their sequences in various species remains unexplored. Here we report the association of miRNA conservation with its sequence features, such as base content and cleavage sites, suggesting that miRNA sequences contain the fingerprints for miRNA conservation. More interestingly, different species show different and even opposite patterns between miRNA conservation and sequence features. For example, mammalian miRNAs show a positive/negative correlation between conservation and AU/GC content, whereas plant miRNAs show a negative/positive correlation between conservation and AU/GC content. Further analysis puts forward the hypothesis that the introns of protein-coding genes may be a main driving force for the origin and evolution of mammalian miRNAs. At the 59 end, conserved miRNAs have a preference for base U, while less-conserved miRNAs have a preference for a non-U base in mammals. This difference does not exist in insects and plants, in which both conserved miRNAs and less-conserved miRNAs have a preference for base U at the 59 end. We further revealed that the non- U preference at the 59 end of less-conserved mammalian miRNAs is associated with miRNA function diversity, which may have evolved from the pressure of a highly sophisticated environmental s