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The Plant Small RNA Maker Site (P-SAMS) is a web tool for the simple and automated design of artificial miRNAs (amiRNAs) and synthetic trans-acting small interfering RNAs (syn-tasiRNAs) for efficient and specific targeted gene silencing in plants. P-SAMS includes two applications, P-SAMS amiRNA Designer and P-SAMS syn-tasiRNA Designer. The navigation through both applications is wizard-assisted, and the job runtime is relatively short.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small single-stranded noncoding RNAs that play an important role in post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression. In this paper, we present a web server for ab initio prediction of the human miRNAs and their precursors. The prediction methods are based on the hidden Markov Models and the context-structural characteristics. By taking into account the identified patterns of primary and secondary structures of the pre-miRNAs, a new HMM model is proposed and the existing context-structural Markov model is modified.

MicroRNAs (miRNA) are small regulatory, noncoding RNA molecules that are transcribed as primary miRNAs (pri-miRNA) from eukaryotic genomes. At least in plants, their regulatory activity is mediated through base-pairing with protein-coding messenger RNAs (mRNA) followed by mRNA degradation or translation repression. We describe NOVOMIR, a program for the identification of miRNA genes in plant genomes.

Emerging evidence has revealed phased siRNAs (phasiRNAs) as important endogenous regulators in plants. However, the integrated prediction tools for phasiRNAs are still limited. In this article, we introduce a stand-alone package PhaseTank for systematically characterizing phasiRNAs and their regulatory networks. (i) It can identify phasiRNAs/tasiRNAs functional cascades (miRNA/phasiRNA -> PHAS loci -> phasiRNA -> target) with high sensitivity and specificity.

The miRBase is the official miRNA repository which keeps the annotation updated on newly discovered miRNAs: it is also used as a reference for the design of miRNA profiling platforms. Nomenclature ambiguities generated by loosely updated platforms and design errors lead to incompatibilities among platforms, even from the same vendor. Published miRNA lists are thus generated with different profiling platforms that refer to diverse and not updated annotations.

There are two main mechanisms of miRNA-mediated gene silencing: either mRNA degradation or translational repression. However, the precise mechanism of target mRNAs regulated by miRNA remains unclear. As a complementary approach to experiment, a computational method was proposed to recognize the mechanism of miRNA-mediated gene silencing in human. We have analyzed extensive features correlated with miRNA-mediated silencing mechanism of mRNA.