Brachypodium distachyon long noncoding RNAs: Genome-wide identification and expression analysis

Recent advances in high throughput sequencing technology have revealed a pervasive and complex transcriptional activity of all eukaryotic genomes and have allowed the identification and characterization of several classes of noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) with key roles in various biological processes. Among ncRNAs, long ncRNAs (lncRNAs) are transcripts typically longer than 200 nucleotides whose members tend to be expressed at low levels, show a lack of phylogenetic conservation and exhibit tissue-specific, cell-specific, or stress-responsive expression profiles. Although a large set of lncRNAs has been identified both in animal and plant systems, the regulatory roles of lncRNAs are only beginning to be recognized and the molecular basis of lncRNA mediated gene regulation remains largely unexplored, particularly in plants. Here, we describe an efficient methodology to identify long noncoding RNAs using next-generation sequencing data.