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Micro-RNAs (miRNAs) are potent regulators of gene expression and cellular phenotype. Each miRNA has the potential to target hundreds of transcripts within the cell thus controlling fundamental cellular processes such as survival and proliferation. Here, we exploit this important feature of miRNA networks to discover vulnerabilities in cancer phenotype, and map miRNA-target relationships across different cancer types.

Schizophrenia is a major debilitating psychiatric disorder affecting approximately 1% of the population worldwide. A tremendous amount of effort has been expended in the last two decades to identify genes influencing susceptibility to this disorder. Although there is a strong trend toward integrating data obtained from various genetic studies and their related biological information into a comprehensive resource for many complex diseases, we were unable to find such an effort for schizophrenia or for any other psychiatric disorder yet.

In the last decade, sequencing projects have led to the development of a number of annotation systems dedicated to the structural and functional annotation of protein-coding genes. These annotation systems manage the annotation of the non-protein coding genes (ncRNAs) in a very crude way, allowing neither the edition of the secondary structures nor the clustering of ncRNA genes into families which are crucial for appropriate annotation of these molecules.

Over the past few years, experimental evidence has highlighted the role of microRNAs to human diseases. miRNAs are critical for the regulation of cellular processes, and, therefore, their aberration can be among the triggering causes of pathological phenomena. They are just one member of the large class of non-coding RNAs, which include transcribed ultra-conserved regions (T-UCRs), small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs), PIWI-interacting RNAs (piRNAs), large intergenic non-coding RNAs (lincRNAs) and, the heterogeneous group of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs).