Plant tRNA & tRF Expression DB

ABOUT

In 1970s, tRNA-derived fragments (tRFs) were originally found in the tumor tissues of cancer patients, but were considered as the turnover products of tRNAs (Borek et al. 1977). The advent of high throughput sequencing technology enabled detection of tRFs as an abundant group of small RNAs (Lee et al. 2009). There is increasing evidence that tRFs or tRNA-derived small RNAs (tsRNAs) regulate an array of cellular activities (see review by Kumar et al. 2016), and are associated with diseases. Studies in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana showed that tRF expressions are highly dynamic (cognat et al. 2017). 19-nt tRF-5 was shown to accumulate in pollen and cleave transposable element transcripts (Martinez et al. 2017). A recent work in Arabidopsis revealed tRFs play roles in modulating translation (Lalande et al. 2020). A study in soybean demonstrated that bacteria tRFs regulate nodule formation (Ren et al. 2020). The field of plant tRNA/tRF biology is developing and the web databases have been reported (Gupta et al. 2018; Thompson et al. 2018). Recently, we performed tRNA-seq and YAMAT-seq, and developed bioinformatics tool to profile and analyze tRNA and tRF expressions in plants. This database allows for searching our tRNA and tRF expression data.