MAC OS

The interest in investigating the biological roles of small non-coding RNAs (sncRNAs) is increasing, due to the pleiotropic effects of these molecules exert in many biological contexts. While several methods and tools are available to study microRNAs (miRNAs), only few focus on novel classes of sncRNAs, in particular PIWI-interacting RNAs (piRNAs). To overcome these limitations, we implemented iSmaRT (integrative Small RNA Tool-kit), an automated pipeline to analyze smallRNA-Seq data.

High-confidence prediction of complex traits such as disease risk or drug response is an ultimate goal of personalized medicine. Although genome-wide association studies have discovered thousands of well-replicated polymorphisms associated with a broad spectrum of complex traits, the combined predictive power of these associations for any given trait is generally too low to be of clinical relevance. We propose a novel systems approach to complex trait prediction, which leverages and integrates similarity in genetic, transcriptomic, or other omics-level data.

It is known that tumor micro-RNAs (miRNA) can define patient survival and treatment response. We present a framework to identify miRNAs which are predictive of cancer survival. The framework attempts to rank the miRNAs by exploring their collaborative role in gene regulation. Our approach tests a significantly large number of combinatorial cases leveraging parallel computation. We carefully avoided parametric assumptions involved in evaluations of miRNA expressions but used rigorous statistical computation to assign an importance score to a miRNA.