mutant plants as well as 3 individual wild-type (WT) controls were
collected, frozen in liquid nitrogen and kept at −80°C until
use. The total RNA extraction and small RNA enrichment were performed as
previously described68 (link)with the following minor modifications: (1) for the small RNA enrichment
step an equal volume of 20% polyethylene glycol 8000/2M NaCl was added to
each total RNA sample and (2) the ZR-small RNA ladder (Zymo Research, Cat#
R1090) was used to determine the gel region corresponding to the
17–29 nucleotide (nt) size range. The resulting small RNAs were then
used for library preparation with the NEBNext Multiplex Small RNA Library
Prep Set for Illumina (New England Biolabs, Cat# E7300) following the
user’s manual. The final library products were further purified using
an 8% polyacrylamide gel to excise 130–160nt products relative to the
pBR322 DNA-MspI Digest ladder (New England Biolabs, Cat# E7323AA). The
libraries were pooled and sequenced (single end 50bp, SE50) on a HiSeq 2500
machine (Illumina).