Ylla Bou, Guillem, 1990-Fromm, BastianPiulachs i Bagà, M. DolorsBellés, Xavier, 1952-2018-08-292018-08-292016Ylla G, Fromm B, Piulachs MD, Belles X. The microRNA toolkit of insects. Sci Rep. 2016 Nov 24;6:37736. DOI: 10.1038/srep377362045-2322http://hdl.handle.net/10230/35402Is there a correlation between miRNA diversity and levels of organismic complexity? Exhibiting extraordinary levels of morphological and developmental complexity, insects are the most diverse animal class on earth. Their evolutionary success was in particular shaped by the innovation of holometabolan metamorphosis in endopterygotes. Previously, miRNA evolution had been linked to morphological complexity, but astonishing variation in the currently available miRNA complements of insects made this link unclear. To address this issue, we sequenced the miRNA complement of the hemimetabolan Blattella germanica and reannotated that of two other hemimetabolan species, Locusta migratoria and Acyrthosiphon pisum, and of four holometabolan species, Apis mellifera, Tribolium castaneum, Bombyx mori and Drosophila melanogaster. Our analyses show that the variation of insect miRNAs is an artefact mainly resulting from poor sampling and inaccurate miRNA annotation, and that insects share a conserved microRNA toolkit of 65 families exhibiting very low variation. For example, the evolutionary shift toward a complete metamorphosis was accompanied only by the acquisition of three and the loss of one miRNA families.application/pdfeng© Guillem Ylla, Bastian Fromm, Maria-Dolors Piulachs & Xavier Belles, 2016. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the materialInsectes -- GenèticaMicroARNinfo:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep37736info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess