ABSTRACT
The recent discovery of the miRNA-mediated gene-regulatory mechanism has had a significant impact on the understanding of developmental processes in both plants and animals. Plant-associated miRNAs were identified by a cloning method in 2002, 10 years after the discovery of animal miRNAs [1-3]. Since then, several hundred miRNAs have been identified in diverse plant species and deposited in an miRNA database (miRBase) [4-6].
