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siDirect (http://design.RNAi.jp/) is a web-based online software system for computing highly effective small interfering RNA (siRNA) sequences with maximum target-specificity for mammalian RNA interference (RNAi). Highly effective siRNA sequences are selected using novel guidelines that were established through an extensive study of the relationship between siRNA sequences and RNAi activity.

Recent work has demonstrated that microRNAs (miRNAs) are involved in critical biological processes by suppressing the translation of coding genes. This work develops an integrated database, miRNAMap, to store the known miRNA genes, the putative miRNA genes, the known miRNA targets and the putative miRNA targets. The known miRNA genes in four mammalian genomes such as human, mouse, rat and dog are obtained from miRBase, and experimentally validated miRNA targets are identified in a survey of the literature.

The Whitehead siRNA (short interfering RNA) Selection Web Server (http://jura.wi.mit.edu/bioc/siRNA) automates the design of short oligonucleotides that can specifically 'knock down' expression of target genes. These short sequences are about 21 nt in length, and when synthesized as double stranded RNA and introduced into cell culture, can reduce or eliminate the function of the target gene. Depending on the length of a gene, there are potentially numerous combinations of possible 21mers.

The laboratory mouse is the premier animal model for studying human biology because all life stages can be accessed experimentally, a completely sequenced reference genome is publicly available and there exists a myriad of genomic tools for comparative and experimental research. In the current era of genome scale, data-driven biomedical research, the integration of genetic, genomic and biological data are essential for realizing the full potential of the mouse as an experimental model.

The ultimate goal of any genome-scale experiment is to provide a functional interpretation of the data, relating the available information with the hypotheses that originated the experiment. Thus, functional profiling methods have become essential in diverse scenarios such as microarray experiments, proteomics, etc. We present the FatiGO+, a web-based tool for the functional profiling of genome-scale experiments, specially oriented to the interpretation of microarray experiments.

With few exceptions, current methods for short read mapping make use of simple seed heuristics to speed up the search. Most of the underlying matching models neglect the necessity to allow not only mismatches, but also insertions and deletions. Current evaluations indicate, however, that very different error models apply to the novel high-throughput sequencing methods. While the most frequent error-type in Illumina reads are mismatches, reads produced by 454's GS FLX predominantly contain insertions and deletions (indels).