MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small, non-coding RNAs that post-transcriptionally repress gene expression (Gebert and MacRae, 2018). While many miRNA genes and their families have been analyzed for function (Miska et al. 2007, Alvarez-Saavedra and Horvitz 2010), there are microRNA genes for which loss of function alleles have not yet been generated. There are no available alleles for the C. elegans
mir-49 gene.
Using CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing, we generated two deletion alleles,
zen99 and
zen102, that disrupt the C. elegans
mir-49 gene (Fig 1A).
mir-49(
zen99) and
mir-49(
zen102) delete 56 base pairs and 58 base pairs from the
mir-49 locus, respectively (Fig 1B and Fig 1C). Each deletion nearly completely removes both strands generated by the
mir-49 locus,
mir-49-3p and
mir-49-5p. Both
mir-49 alleles are homozygous viable and appear to be superficially wild type. Careful phenotypic analysis will be important to characterize the effects of the two
mir-49 deletions.