Human

This report describes the miRQuest - a novel middleware available in a Web server that allows the end user to do the miRNA research in a user-friendly way. It is known that there are many prediction tools for microRNA (miRNA) identification that use different programming languages and methods to realize this task. It is difficult to understand each tool and apply it to diverse datasets and organisms available for miRNA analysis. miRQuest can easily be used by biologists and researchers with limited experience with bioinformatics.

The miRBase database is the central and official repository for miRNAs and the current release is miRBase version 21.0. Name changes in different miRBase releases cause inconsistencies in miRNA names from version to version. When working with only a small number of miRNAs the translation can be done manually. However, with large sets of miRNAs, the necessary correction of such inconsistencies becomes burdensome and error-prone.

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.

Deep sequencing has become the method of choice for determining the small RNA content of a cell. Mapping the sequenced reads onto their reference genome serves as the basis for all further analyses, namely for identification and quantification. A method frequently used is Mega BLAST followed by several filtering steps, even though it is slow and inefficient for this task. Also, none of the currently available short read aligners has established itself for the particular task of small RNA mapping.