Natural Antisense Transcripts Associated with Salinity Response in Alfalfa

Natural antisense transcripts (NATs) are long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) complementary to the messenger (sense) RNA (Wang et al., 2014). Many of them are involved in regulation of their own sense transcripts thus playing pivotal biological roles in all processes of organismal development and responses to the environment. In our previous study, we have identified a number of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in alfalfa plants (Medicago sativa L.) subjected to salinity stress (Postnikova et al., 2013). In this work, we selected several experimentally validated DEGs identified in response to salt and analyzed them for the presence of NAT pairs. The majority of the examined DEGs encoded NATs. Expression of some NAT pairs changed in response to salinity, suggesting their involvement in regulating the responses of alfalfa to salt.