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There are abundance of transcripts that code for no particular protein and that remain functionally uncharacterized. Some of these transcripts may have novel functions while others might be junk transcripts. Unfortunately, the experimental validation of such transcripts to find functional non-coding RNA candidates is very costly. Therefore, our primary interest is to computationally mine candidate functional transcripts from a pool of uncharacterized transcripts.

MicroRNAs (miRNA) are approximately 21 nucleotide-long non-coding small RNAs, which function as post-transcriptional regulators in eukaryotes. miRNAs play essential roles in regulating plant growth and development. In recent years, research into the mechanism and consequences of miRNA action has made great progress.

MicroRNAs are short, approximately 22 nucleotide noncoding RNAs binding to partially complementary sites in the 3'UTR of target mRNAs. This process generally results in repression of multiple targets by a particular microRNA. There is substantial interest in methods designed to predict the microRNA targets and effect of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) on microRNA binding, given the impact of microRNA on posttranscriptional regulation and its potential relation to complex diseases.

Soybean Knowledge Base (SoyKB) is a comprehensive all-inclusive web resource for soybean translational genomics. SoyKB is designed to handle the management and integration of soybean genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics data along with annotation of gene function and biological pathway. It contains information on four entities, namely genes, microRNAs, metabolites and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs).

Studying the muscular hypertrophy of Texel sheep by forward genetics, we have identified an A-to-G transition in the 3'UTR of the GDF8 gene that reveals an illegitimate target site for microRNAs miR-1 and miR-206 that are highly expressed in skeletal muscle. This causes the down-regulation of this muscle-specific chalone and hence contributes to the muscular hypertrophy of Texel sheep.

MicroRNAs (miRNA) are approximately 22 nt long non-coding RNAs that are derived from larger hairpin RNA precursors and play important regulatory roles in both animals and plants. The short length of the miRNA sequences and relatively low conservation of pre-miRNA sequences restrict the conventional sequence-alignment-based methods to finding only relatively close homologs. On the other hand, it has been reported that miRNA genes are more conserved in the secondary structure rather than in primary sequences.