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High-throughput and high-content databases are increasingly important resources in molecular medicine, systems biology, and pharmacology. However, the information usually resides in unwieldy databases, limiting ready data analysis and integration. One resource that offers substantial potential for improvement in this regard is the NCI-60 cell line database compiled by the U.S. National Cancer Institute, which has been extensively characterized across numerous genomic and pharmacologic response platforms.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) measured from blood samples are promising minimally invasive biomarker candidates that have been extensively studied in several case-control studies. However, the influence of age and sex as confounding variables remains largely unknown.

MicroRNAs are known to be generated from primary transcripts mainly through the sequential cleavages by two enzymes, Drosha and Dicer. The sequence of a mature microRNA, especially the 'seeding sequence', largely determines its binding ability and specificity to target mRNAs. Therefore, methods that predict mature microRNA sequences with high accuracy will benefit the identification and characterization of novel microRNAs and their targets, and contribute to inferring the post-transcriptional regulation network at a genome scale.

Accurate reconstruction of the regulatory networks that control gene expression is one of the key current challenges in molecular biology. Although gene expression and chromatin state dynamics are ultimately encoded by constellations of binding sites recognized by regulators such as transcriptions factors (TFs) and microRNAs (miRNAs), our understanding of this regulatory code and its context-dependent read-out remains very limited.