Ensuring agricultural food security is a major concern for the future world, and being the second most consumed crop, rice yield needs an urgent upliftment. Grain yield is a pleiotropic trait that employs a plethora of genes functioning in complex signalling cascades. The yield related genes are controlled by various regulatory factors including the microRNAs (miRNAs), the small 20–22 nucleotide (nt) non-coding RNAs, which have emerged as the master ribo-regulators of eukaryotic genes. Plant miRNAs can bind to highly complementary sequences in the target messenger RNAs (mRNAs) and negatively regulate gene expression to coordinate the various biological processes involved in plant development. In rice, an ideal plant architecture (IPA) has been regarded as the key to attain high yield and several miRNAs have been deciphered to play important roles in orchestrating vital regulatory procedures for achieving optimum plant morphological yield related traits like less unproductive tillers, more panicle branches and heavier grains. In this review, we present and discuss the various genetic engineering strategies undertaken to manipulate the miRNA-mRNA expression levels in order to achieve improved grain output by modulation of rice plant architecture and recent advances made in this regard.

中文翻译：

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MicroRNAs 作为通过植物结构调节提高水稻产量的潜在目标：最近的研究和未来展望

确保农业粮食安全是未来世界的主要关切，作为第二大消费作物，水稻产量急需提高。谷物产量是一种多效性状，它利用了大量在复杂信号级联中起作用的基因。产量相关基因受各种调控因素控制，包括微小 RNA (miRNA)，即 20-22 个核苷酸 (nt) 的小非编码 RNA，它们已成为真核基因的主要核糖调节因子。植物 miRNA 可以与目标信使 RNA (mRNA) 中的高度互补序列结合，并负向调节基因表达以协调植物发育中涉及的各种生物过程。在米饭中，理想的植物结构 (IPA) 被认为是获得高产的关键，并且已经破译了几种 miRNA 在协调重要的调控程序中发挥重要作用，以实现最佳的植物形态学产量相关性状，例如非生产性分蘖减少、穗分枝更多和更重谷物。在这篇综述中，我们介绍并讨论了各种用于操纵 miRNA-mRNA 表达水平的基因工程策略，以便通过调节水稻植物结构来提高谷物产量，以及在这方面取得的最新进展。