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Being involved in many important biological processes, miRNAs can regulate gene expression by targeting mRNAs to facilitate their degradation or translational inhibition. Many miRNA sequencing studies reveal that miRNA variations such as isomiRs and "arm switching" are biologically relevant. However, existing standalone tools usually do not provide comprehensive, detailed information on miRNA variations. To deepen our understanding of miRNA variability, we developed a new standalone tool called "mirPRo" to quantify known miRNAs and predict novel miRNAs.

The massive use of Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies is uncovering an unexpected amount of variability. The functional characterization of such variability, particularly in the most common form of variation found, the Single Nucleotide Variants (SNVs), has become a priority that needs to be addressed in a systematic way.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) regulate gene expression through translational repression and RNA degradation. Recently developed high-throughput proteomic methods measure gene expression changes at protein level and therefore can reveal the direct effects of miRNAs' translational repression. Here, we present a web server, ProteoMirExpress, that integrates proteomic and mRNA expression data together to infer miRNA-centered regulatory networks.

In practice, identifying and interpreting the functional impacts of the regulatory relationships between micro-RNA and messenger-RNA is non-trivial. The sheer scale of possible micro-RNA and messenger-RNA interactions can make the interpretation of results difficult.