Tools Gallery

The Bioinformatics Links Directory is an online community resource that contains a directory of freely available tools, databases, and resources for bioinformatics and molecular biology research. The listing of the servers published in this and previous issues of Nucleic Acids Research together with other useful tools and websites represents a rich repository of resources that are openly provided to the research community using internet technologies.

In the last years post-transcriptional regulation (PTR) of gene expression has been increasingly recognized to be a powerful and general determinant of the quantitative changes in proteomes, and therefore a driving force for cell phenotypes. By means of networks of trans-factors on one hand, and cis-elements found primarily in untranslated regions (UTRs) of mRNA on the other hand, mRNA availability to translation and translation rates are tightly controlled and can be rapidly tuned according to the changing state of the cell.

MiRNAs are short, non-coding molecules that negatively regulate gene expression and thereby play several important roles in living organisms. Dozens of computational methods for miRNA-related research have been developed, which greatly differ in various aspects. The substantial availability of difficult-to-compare approaches makes it challenging for the user to select a proper tool and prompts the need for a solution that will collect and categorize all the methods.