Immunoprecipitation of RNA binding proteins (RBPs) after in vivo crosslinking, coupled with sequencing of associated RNA footprints (HITS-CLIP, CLIP-seq), is a method of choice for the identification of RNA targets and binding sites for RBPs. Compared with RNA-seq, CLIP-seq analysis is widely diverse and depending on the RBPs that are analyzed, the approaches vary significantly, necessitating the development of flexible and efficient informatics tools.
MicroRNAs play important roles in most biological processes, including cell proliferation, tissue differentiation, and embryonic development, among others. They originate from precursor transcripts (pre-miRNAs), which contain phylogenetically conserved stem-loop structures. An important bioinformatics problem is to distinguish the pre-miRNAs from pseudo pre-miRNAs that have similar stem-loop structures. We present here a novel method for tackling this bioinformatics problem.
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) regulate various biological functions by binding hundreds of transcripts to impart post-transcriptional repression. Recently, by applying a transcriptome-wide experimental method for identifying miRNA target sites (Ago HITS-CLIP), a novel non-canonical target site, named 'nucleation bulge', was discovered as widespread, functional and evolutionally conserved. Although such non-canonical nucleation bulges have been proven to be predictive by using 'pivot pairing rule' and sequence conservation, this approach has not been applied yet.
Post ENCODE, regulatory sRNAs (rsRNAs) like miRNAs have established their status as one of the core regulatory elements of cell systems. However, large number of rsRNAs are compromised due to traditional approaches to identify miRNAs, limiting the otherwise vast world of rsRNAs mainly to hair-pin loop bred typical miRNAs. The present study has analyzed for the first time a huge volume of sequencing data from 4997 individuals and 25 cancer types to report 11 234 potentially regulatory small RNAs which appear to have deep reaching impact.
Most human genes produce several transcripts with different exon contents by using alternative promoters, alternative polyadenylation sites and alternative splice sites. Much effort has been devoted to describing known gene transcripts through the development of numerous databases. Nevertheless, owing to the diversity of the transcriptome, there is a need for interactive databases that provide information about the potential function of each splicing variant, as well as its expression pattern.
Biological pathways are important for understanding biological mechanisms. Thus, finding important pathways that underlie biological problems helps researchers to focus on the most relevant sets of genes. Pathways resemble networks with complicated structures, but most of the existing pathway enrichment tools ignore topological information embedded within pathways, which limits their applicability.
Large-scale RNAseq has substantially changed the transcriptomics field, as it enables an unprecedented amount of high resolution data to be acquired. However, the analysis of these data still poses a challenge to the research community. Many tools have been developed to overcome this problem, and to facilitate the study of miRNA expression profiles and those of their target genes. While a few of these enable both kinds of analysis to be performed, they also present certain limitations in terms of their requirements and/or the restrictions on data uploading.
Autism is a highly heritable complex neurodevelopmental disorder, therefore identifying its genetic basis has been challenging. To date, numerous susceptibility genes and chromosomal abnormalities have been reported in association with autism, but most discoveries either fail to be replicated or account for a small effect. Thus, in most cases the underlying causative genetic mechanisms are not fully understood.
In plants, short RNAs including approximately 21-nt microRNA (miRNA) and 21-nt trans-acting siRNA (ta-siRNA) compose a 'miRNA --> ta-siRNA --> target gene' cascade pathway that regulates gene expression at the posttranscriptional level. In this cascade, biogenesis of ta-siRNA clusters requires 21-nt intervals (i.e. phasing) and miRNA (phase-initiator) cleavage sites on its TAS transcript. Here, we report a novel web server, pssRNAMiner, which is developed to identify both the clusters of phased small RNAs as well as the potential phase-initiator.
Our database aim to make it easy for researchers to find the right tools or data source for their own specific study in miRNA field. Now we have collect >1000 tools. This database will update when every new 100 tools add in. Last update time 22nd April, 2018 (v1.2).
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