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Updated: Aug 11, 2026

A Bioinformatics Pipeline to Accurately and Efficiently Analyze the MicroRNA Transcriptomes in Plants
Published on: January 21, 2020
Evolution of Arabidopsis microRNA families through duplication events
Christopher Maher1, Lincoln Stein, Doreen Ware
1Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, New York 11724, USA. maher@cshl.edu
Abstract:
Recently there has been a great interest in the identification of microRNAs and their targets as well as understanding the spatial and temporal regulation of microRNA genes. To understand how microRNA genes evolve, we looked at several rapidly evolving families in Arabidopsis thaliana, and found that they arose from a process of genome-wide duplication, tandem duplication, and segmental duplication followed by dispersal and diversification, similar to the processes that drive the evolution of protein gene families. Using multiple expression data sets to examine the transcription patterns of different members of the microRNA families, we find the sequence diversification of duplicated microRNA genes to be accompanied by a change in spatial and temporal expression patterns, suggesting that duplicated copies acquire new functionality as they evolve.
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