Arabidopsis

Many plant genomes are already known, and new ones are being sequenced every year. The next step for researchers is to identify all of the functional elements in these genomes, including the important class of functional elements known as microRNAs (miRNAs), which are involved in posttranscriptional regulatory pathways. However, computational tools for predicting new plant miRNAs are limited, and there is a particular need for tools that can be used easily by laboratory researchers.

The computational prediction of novel microRNA within a full genome involves identifying sequences having the highest chance of being a miRNA precursor (pre-miRNA). These sequences are usually named candidates to miRNA. The well-known pre-miRNAs are usually only a few in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of potential candidates to miRNA that have to be analyzed, which makes this task a high classimbalance classification problem.

High-throughput measurement technologies have triggered a rise in large-scale cancer studies containing multiple levels of molecular data. While there are a number of efficient methods to analyze individual data types, there are far less that enhance data interpretation after analysis. We present the R package Director, a dynamic visualization approach to linking and interrogating multiple levels of molecular data after analysis for clinically meaningful, actionable insights.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play essential roles in plant growth, development and stress responses through post-transcriptionally regulating the expression levels of their target mRNAs. Although some tools and databases were developed for predicting the relationships between miRNAs and their targets (miR-Tar), most of them were dependent on computational methods without experimental validations. With development of degradome sequencing techniques, researchers can identify potential interactions based on degradome sequencing data.