Several measurements were taken for each focal plant to assess plant fitness, including days to first flower (phase 6, Boyes et al., 2001), height of longest inflorescence at the onset of silique maturation and total seed mass.
In this study, seven miRNA showed significantly different expression between two flowering phases.
Thus, our experiments confirmed that the seven miRNAs were differentially expressed during two flowering phases.
Differential expression analysis of two flowering phases was performed using the DESeq R package (1.8.3).
Additional file 4: The expression of the novel miRNA in four libraries from two flowering phases.
Expression analysis of RNA-seq and qRT-PCR identified novel and conserved miRNA that were differentially expressed during flowering phases.
To identify differential expression of miRNAs between two flowering phases, normalized miRNA levels were compared between PS1 and PS4.
As shown in our results, three members of cen-miR167 family were all expressed at low levels during both flowering phases and targeted auxin response factor.
In this study, we employed Solexa technology to sequence four small RNA libraries from two flowering phases to identify miRNAs related to floral development.
In our study, cen-miR156 and cen-miR172 were identified during both flowering phases, suggesting that they may have roles in flowering and determining identity of floral organs in C. ensifolium.
