PlaMoM: a comprehensive database compiles plant mobile macromolecules

Abstract

In plants, various phloem-mobile macromolecules including noncoding RNAs, mRNAs and proteins are suggested to act as important long-distance signals in regulating crucial physiological and morphological transition processes such as flowering, plant growth and stress responses. Given recent advances in high-throughput sequencing technologies, numerous mobile macromolecules have been identified in diverse plant species from different plant families. However, most of the identified mobile macromolecules are not annotated in current versions of species-specific databases and are only available as non-searchable datasheets. To facilitate study of the mobile signaling macromolecules, we compiled the PlaMoM (Plant Mobile Macromolecules) database, a resource that provides convenient and interactive search tools allowing users to retrieve, to analyze and also to predict mobile RNAs/proteins. Each entry in the PlaMoM contains detailed information such as nucleotide/amino acid sequences, ortholog partners, related experiments, gene functions and literature. For the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, protein-protein interactions of mobile transcripts are presented as interactive molecular networks. Furthermore, PlaMoM provides a built-in tool to identify potential RNA mobility signals such as tRNA-like structures. The current version of PlaMoM compiles a total of 17 991 mobile macromolecules from 14 plant species/ecotypes from published data and literature. PlaMoM is available at http://www.systembioinfo.org/plamom/.