Distribution of MITE family Monkey King in rapeseed (Brassica napus L) and its influence on gene expression.

ABSTRACT

Miniature inverted-repeat transposable elements (MITEs) are a group of class II transposable elements. The MITE Monkey King (MK) was first discovered upstream of BnFLC.A10. In this study, genome resequencing of four selected B. napus accessions, revealed more than 4000 distributed copies of MKs constituting ~2.4 Mb of the B. napus genomic sequence and caused 677 polymorphisms among the four accessions. MK -polymorphism-related markers across 128 natural and 58 synthetic accessions revealed more polymorphic MKs in natural than synthetic accessions. Ten MK -induced indels significantly affected the expression levels of the nearest gene based on RNAseq analysis, six of these effects were subsequently confirmed using qRT-PCR. Decreased expression pattern of MK -derived miRNA-bna-miR6031 was also observed under various stress treatments. Further research focused on the MITE families should promote not only our understanding of gene regulatory networks but also inform crop improvement efforts.