Assessing 5S ribosomal RNA heterogeneity in Arabidopsis thaliana using short RNA next generation sequencing data

Abstract

Ribosomal 5S rRNAs in eukaryotes are products of multigene families organized within clusters of repeating units. Accumulation of genomic data from a variety of organisms demonstrated that the potential 5S rRNA coding sequences show a large number of variants, often incompatible with folding into correct secondary structure. Here we present results of an analysis of the large set of short RNA sequences generated by next generation sequencing techniques to address the problem of heterogeneity of the 5S rRNA transcripts in Arabidopsis and identification of potentially functional rRNA-derived fragments.