Fruitfly

DroID (http://droidb.org/), the Drosophila Interactions Database, is a comprehensive public resource for Drosophila gene and protein interactions. DroID contains genetic interactions and experimentally detected protein-protein interactions curated from the literature and from external databases, and predicted protein interactions based on experiments in other species. Protein interactions are annotated with experimental details and periodically updated confidence scores.

Thermodynamics-based dynamic programming RNA secondary structure algorithms have been of immense importance in molecular biology, where applications range from the detection of novel selenoproteins using expressed sequence tag (EST) data, to the determination of microRNA genes and their targets. Dynamic programming algorithms have been developed to compute the minimum free energy secondary structure and partition function of a given RNA sequence, the minimum free-energy and partition function for the hybridization of two RNA molecules, etc.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNAs that play a role in post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression in most eukaryotes. They help in fine-tuning gene expression by targeting messenger RNAs (mRNA). The interactions of miRNAs and mRNAs are sequence specific and computational tools have been developed to predict miRNA target sites on mRNAs, but miRNA research has been mainly focused on target sites within 3' untranslated regions (UTRs) of genes.

The continuous increase of available biological data as consequence of modern high-throughput technologies poses new challenges for analysis techniques and database applications. Especially for miRNAs, one class of small non-coding RNAs, many algorithms have been developed to predict new candidates from next-generation sequencing data. While the amount of publications describing novel miRNA candidates keeps steadily increasing, the current gold standard database for miRNAs - miRBase - has not been updated since June 2014.