Arabidopsis micro-RNA biogenesis through Dicer-like 1 protein functions

Micro-RNAs (miRNAs) are small, noncoding RNAs of 18-25 nt in length that negatively regulate their complementary mRNAs at the posttranscriptional level. Previous work has shown that some RNase III-like enzymes such as Drosha and Dicer are known to be involved in miRNA biogenesis in animals. However, the mechanism of plant miRNA biogenesis still remains poorly understood. In this article, the process of Arabidopsis miR163 biogenesis was examined. The results revealed that two types of miR163 primary transcripts (pri-miR163s) are transcribed from a single gene by RNA polymerase II and that miR163 biogenesis requires at least three cleavage steps by RNase III-like enzymes at 21-nt-long intervals. The first step…