Human

Integrative Short Reads NAvigator (ISRNA) is an online toolkit for analyzing high-throughput small RNA sequencing data. Besides the high-speed genome mapping function, ISRNA provides statistics for genomic location, length distribution and nucleotide composition bias analysis of sequence reads. Number of reads mapped to known microRNAs and other classes of short non-coding RNAs, coverage of short reads on genes, expression abundance of sequence reads as well as some other analysis functions are also supported.

A useful step for understanding the function of microRNAs (miRNA) or siRNAs is the detection of their effects on genome-wide expression profiles. Typically, approaches look for enrichment of words in the 3(')UTR sequences of the most deregulated genes. A number of tools are available for this purpose, but they require either in-depth computational knowledge, filtered 3(')UTR sequences for the genome of interest, or a set of genes acquired through an arbitrary expression cutoff.

Non-coding elements such as miRNAs play key regulatory roles in living systems. These ultra-short, ~21 bp long, RNA molecules are derived from their hairpin precursors and usually participate in negative gene regulation by binding the target mRNAs. Discovering miRNA candidate regions across the genome has been a challenging problem. Most of the existing tools work reliably only for limited datasets.

Accurate reconstruction of the regulatory networks that control gene expression is one of the key current challenges in molecular biology. Although gene expression and chromatin state dynamics are ultimately encoded by constellations of binding sites recognized by regulators such as transcriptions factors (TFs) and microRNAs (miRNAs), our understanding of this regulatory code and its context-dependent read-out remains very limited.