Mining of diverse short non-coding RNAs from transcriptome of milk somatic cells of Murrah buffalo

Abstract

The non-coding RNAs (ncRNA) are known to regulate expression of genes at the transcription, translation and processing levels. The present study was conducted to identify diverse short ncRNAs from milk somatic cells of lactating Murrah buffaloes. Elucidating the molecular drivers of lactation in dairy animals will help understand the process of lactation, eventually leading to improvement in milk production and quality. In order to discover the ncRNA, the transcriptome data of 12 samples of somatic cells from buffalo milk were analyzed. A web based pipeline, exceRpt was used to perform the analysis. The most abundant short ncRNA molecules discovered in buffalo milk were the miRNAs, followed by snRNAs. Least number of rRNAs was discovered in the investigated samples. The total number of rRNAs, tRNAs, snRNAs, snoRNAs and miRNAs were 12, 23, 72, 51 and 229 respectively, in the entire dataset. On matching with miRBase v22.1, a total of 1724, 897, 211 and 4 miRNAs were observed to be common to human, bovine, caprine and ovine genomes. The results provide information on the bioavailability of short ncRNAs in buffalo milk somatic cells, most of which are largely uncharacterized. The generated information is a step towards developing a database for ncRNAs in buffalo species.