Comparative Characterization of Cardiac Development Specific microRNAs: Fetal Regulators for Future

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small, conserved RNAs known to regulate several biological processes by influencing gene expression in eukaryotes. The implication of miRNAs as another player of regulatory layers during heart development and diseases has recently been explored. However, there is no study which elucidates the profiling of miRNAs during development of heart till date. Very limited miRNAs have been reported to date in cardiac context. In addition, integration of large scale experimental data with computational and comparative approaches remains an unsolved challenge.The present study was designed to identify the microRNAs implicated in heart development using next generation sequencing, bioinformatics and experimental approaches. We sequenced six small RNA libraries prepared from different developmental stages of the heart using chicken as a model system to produce millions of short sequence reads. We detected 353 known and 703 novel miRNAs involved in heart development. Out of total 1056 microRNAs identified, 32.7% of total dataset of known microRNAs displayed differential expression whereas seven well studied microRNAs namely let-7, miR-140, miR-181, miR-30, miR-205, miR-103 and miR-22 were found to be conserved throughout the heart development. The 3'UTR sequences of genes were screened from Gallus gallus genome for potential microRNA targets. The target mRNAs were appeared to be enriched with genes related to cell cycle, apoptosis, signaling pathways, extracellular remodeling, metabolism, chromatin remodeling and transcriptional regulators. Our study presents the first comprehensive overview of microRNA profiling during heart development and prediction of possible cardiac specific targets and has a big potential in future to develop microRNA based therapeutics against cardiac pathologies where fetal gene re-expression is witnessed in adult heart.