Mouse

RNA interference (RNAi) is a widely adopted tool for loss-of-function studies but RNAi results only have biological relevance if the reagents are appropriately mapped to genes. Several groups have designed and generated RNAi reagent libraries for studies in cells or in vivo for Drosophila and other species. At first glance, matching RNAi reagents to genes appears to be a simple problem, as each reagent is typically designed to target a single gene. In practice, however, the reagent-gene relationship is complex.

Analysis of signaling pathways and their crosstalk is a cornerstone of systems biology. Thousands of papers have been published on these topics. Surprisingly, there is no database that carefully and explicitly documents crosstalk between specific pairs of signaling pathways. We have developed XTalkDB (http://www.xtalkdb.org) to fill this very important gap. XTalkDB contains curated information for 650 pairs of pathways from over 1600 publications. In addition, the database reports the molecular components (e.g.

Computational methods for microRNA target prediction are a fundamental step to understand the miRNA role in gene regulation, a key process in molecular biology. In this paper we present miREE, a novel microRNA target prediction tool. miREE is an ensemble of two parts entailing complementary but integrated roles in the prediction. The Ab-Initio module leverages upon a genetic algorithmic approach to generate a set of candidate sites on the basis of their microRNA-mRNA duplex stability properties.

MicroRNAs are important genetic regulators in both animals and plants. They have a range of functions spanning development, differentiation, growth, metabolism and disease. The advent of next-generation sequencing technologies has made it a relatively straightforward task to detect these molecules and their relative expression via sequencing. There are a large number of published studies with deposited datasets. However, there are currently few resources that capitalize on these data to better understand the features, distribution and biogenesis of miRNAs.