Arabidopsis

Plants are continuously subjected to infection by pathogens, including bacteria and viruses. Bacteria can inject a variety of effector proteins into the host to reprogram host defense mechanism. It is known that microRNAs participate in plant disease resistance to bacterial pathogens and previous studies have suggested that some bacterial effectors have evolved to disturb the host's microRNA-regulated pathways; and so enabling infection.

A fast growing number of non-coding RNAs have recently been discovered to play essential roles in many cellular processes. Similar to proteins, understanding the functions of these active RNAs requires methods for analyzing their tertiary structures. However, in contrast to the wide range of structure-based approaches available for proteins, there is still a lack of methods for studying RNA structures.

miRNAfe is a comprehensive tool to extract features from RNA sequences. It is freely available as a web service, allowing a single access point to almost all state-of-the-art feature extraction methods used today in a variety of works from different authors. It has a very simple user interface, where the user only needs to load a file containing the input sequences and select the features to extract. As a result, the user obtains a text file with the features extracted, which can be used to analyze the sequences or as input to a miRNA prediction software.

A comprehensive analysis of enriched functional categories in differentially expressed genes is important to extract the underlying biological processes of genome-wide expression profiles. Moreover, identification of the network of significant functional modules in these dynamic processes is an interesting challenge. This study introduces DynaMod, a web-based application that identifies significant functional modules reflecting the change of modularity and differential expressions that are correlated with gene expression profiles under different conditions.