Exploring small RNA in food crops: techniques and approaches

Small RNA (sRNA) starts emerging as short-length molecular targets to improve the quality and yield of several food crop varieties. Since plants produce millions of regulatory functional sRNA during different growth, development, and environmental conditions, exploring them in various food crops is a tedious task. However, the advent of techniques such as high throughput next generation sequencing (HT-NGS) of sRNA, enables researchers to explore an enormous amount of sRNA population simultaneously. Although the HT-NGS-based sRNA-Seq technique is frequently utilized in animal and model systems, its application in food crops is just starting to emerge as new methods for high-quality sRNA extraction, unbiased sRNA-Seq library preparation, and computational tools are developing. Therefore, in the current chapter, the recent techniques, and approaches to explore sRNA in food crops are systematically discussed. The current chapter will benefit the researchers working on food crops and related species now and in the future.