RESEARCH ARTICLE
Computational Tools for Genome-Wide miRNA Prediction and Study
Tareq B. Malas1, Timothy Ravasi2, *
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2012Volume: 5
First Page: 23
Last Page: 30
Publisher Id: TOBIOJ-5-23
DOI: 10.2174/1874196701205010023
Article History:
Received Date: 20/05/2009Revision Received Date: 20/10/2009
Acceptance Date: 29/10/2009
Electronic publication date: 02/11/2012
Collection year: 2012
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are single-stranded non-coding RNA susually of 22 nucleotidesin length that play an important post-transcriptional regulation role in many organisms. MicroRNAs bind a seed sequence to the 3'-untranslated region (UTR) region of the target messenger RNA (mRNA), inducing degradation or inhibition of translation and resulting in a reduction in the protein level. This regulatory mechanism is central to many biological processes and perturbation could lead to diseases such as cancer. Given the biological importance, of miRNAs, there is a great need to identify and study their targets and functions. However, miRNAs are very difficult to clone in the lab and this has hindered the identification of novel miRNAs. Next-generation sequencing coupled with new computational tools has recently evolved to help researchers efficiently identify large numbers of novel miRNAs. In this review, we describe recent miRNA prediction tools and discuss their priorities, advantages and disadvantages.