Rice

The prediction of novel pre-microRNA (miRNA) from genomic sequence has received considerable attention recently. However, the majority of studies have focused on the human genome. Previous studies have demonstrated that sensitivity (correctly detecting true miRNA) is sustained when human-trained methods are applied to other species, however they have failed to report the dramatic drop in specificity (the ability to correctly reject non-miRNA sequences) in non-human genomes.

The discovery of microRNAs (miRNAs) remains an important problem, particularly given the growth of high-throughput sequencing, cell sorting and single cell biology. While a large number of miRNAs have already been annotated, there may well be large numbers of miRNAs that are expressed in very particular cell types and remain elusive. Sequencing allows us to quickly and accurately identify the expression of known miRNAs from small RNA-Seq data. The biogenesis of miRNAs leads to very specific characteristics observed in their sequences.

RNAomics, analogous to proteomics, concerns aspects of the secondary and tertiary structure, folding pathway, kinetics, comparison, function and regulation of all RNA in a living organism. Given recently discovered roles played by micro RNA, small interfering RNA, riboswitches, ribozymes, etc., it is important to gain insight into the folding process of RNA sequences. We describe the web server RNALOSS, which provides information about the distribution of locally optimal secondary structures, that possibly form kinetic traps in the folding process.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of short, non-coding RNA that play regulatory roles in a wide variety of biological processes, such as plant growth and abiotic stress responses. Although several computational tools have been developed to identify primary miRNAs and precursor miRNAs (pre-miRNAs), very few provide the functionality of locating mature miRNAs within plant pre-miRNAs.