Creating and maintaining a high-confidence microRNA repository for crop research: A brief review and re-examination of the current crop microRNA registries.

miRBase was established as an authoritative microRNA (miRNA) database with a uniform nomenclature system and a searchable web interface. Recent popularization of the next-generation sequencing technology in small RNA cloning led to an explosive growth of the miRNA repository. Although a specific definition system has been proposed for the plant miRNAs, the quality of the plant miRNA registries deposited in miRBase is largely dependent on the submitters. With the growing concerns over the annotation quality, a set of criteria for identification of the high-confidence (HC) miRNAs was recently developed by miRBase. Since miRNAs could serve as a powerful tool for crop genetic improvement and breeding, we present a brief overview of the miRBase-registered crop miRNAs in this study. A total of 54 plants were identified from the 82 Viridiplantae species in the current version of miRBase, and were regarded as the crops. A total of 6316 precursors encoding 7422 mature miRNAs (miRBase release 22.1) were included in our survey. Based on the HC annotation criteria, we performed structure- and sequencing data-based analyses of the confidence of the crop miRNAs. According to the results, we propose suggestions for improvements of the HC annotation system and, moreover, discuss strategies for creating and maintaining an HC miRNA repository of crops. Finally, we hope that this study inspires more efforts devoted to HC miRNA discoveries for crop research.