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Small RNA research is a rapidly growing field. Apart from microRNAs, which are important regulators of gene expression, other types of functional small RNA molecules have been reported in animals and plants. MicroRNAs are important in host-microbe interactions and parasite microRNAs might modulate the innate immunity of the host. Furthermore, small RNAs can be detected in bodily fluids making them attractive non-invasive biomarker candidates.

As more small RNA sequencing libraries are becoming available, it clearly emerges that microRNAs (miRNAs) are highly heterogeneous both in length and sequence. In comparison to canonical miRNAs, miRNA isoforms (termed as "isomiRs") might exhibit different biological properties, such as a different target repertoire, or enhanced/reduced stability. Nonetheless, this layer of information has remained largely unexplored due to the scarcity of small RNA NGS-datasets and the absence of proper analytical tools.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding single-stranded RNAs (20-23 nts) that are known to act as post-transcriptional and translational regulators of gene expression. Although, they were initially overlooked, their role in many important biological processes, such as development, cell differentiation, and cancer has been established in recent times. In spite of their biological significance, the identification of miRNA genes in newly sequenced organisms is still based, to a large degree, on extensive use of evolutionary conservation, which is not always available.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a set of short (19~24 nt) non-coding RNAs that play significant roles as posttranscriptional regulators in animals and plants. The ab initio prediction methods show excellent performance for discovering new pre-miRNAs. While most of these methods can distinguish real pre-miRNAs from pseudo pre-miRNAs, few can predict the positions of miRNAs. Among the existing methods that can also predict the miRNA positions, most of them are designed for mammalian miRNAs, including human and mouse. Minority of methods can predict the positions of plant miRNAs.