In silico Identification and Characterization of Potential miRNAs From Capsicum annuum

Recently, MicroRNAs (miRNAs) have been shown to be important regulator of genes in many organisms and have been implicated in a growing number of diseases. MiRNA are ~22 in sequences. C. annuum is a well known plant in the world. A total of 1,18,578 Expressed Sequence Tags (EST) of C. annuum were mined from data base of EST's (dbEST) and processed through Seqclean, 490 sequences were trashed and rest of 1,18,088 sequences were masked through RepeatMasker. Contigs were obtained by processing masked sequences through TGICL. A total no. of 25 putative microRNA's with significant similarity with the plant miRNA of closely related species of C. annuum. Majority of the predicted miRNAs were of 24, 23 and 22 nucleotides in length. The potential target of these miRNAs were miRNAs encoding enzymes regulating essential plant metabolic pathways including the putative transcription factor, oxygenases, disease resistance proteins, wound-responsive family protein, early E3 ubiquitinligase, Rhobinding family proteins and mostly are related to the responses to the biotic stresses and stress signaling in plants.