Figure 2

Characterization of BmAgo2-associated small RNAs. (A) Nucleotide compositions of unique small RNAs. BmAgo2-associated small RNAs displayed a strong bias towards "U" at the 5′ end (54.47%). (B) Classification and annotation of small RNAs using the bioinformatics pipeline described in the Materials and Methods. tRFs were recruited by the BmAgo2 protein at an extremely high abundance, and the unannotated small RNAs comprised many diverse sequences with a low expression abundance. Of the 110,157 piRNA candidates, 54033 were derived from TEs, accounting for 6.64% of the total unique small RNAs. Thus, the actual percent of TE-derived sRNAs was 47.78% (41.14% + 6.64%). sRNAs: small RNAs.