isomiR-SEA: an RNA-Seq analysis tool for miRNAs/isomiRs expression level profiling and miRNA-mRNA interaction sites evaluation

摘要

BackgroundMassive parallel sequencing of transcriptomes, revealed the presence of many miRNAs and miRNAs variants named isomiRs with a potential role in several cellular processes through their interaction with a target mRNA. Many methods and tools have been recently devised to detect and quantify miRNAs from sequencing data. However, all of them are implemented on top of general purpose alignment methods, thus providing poorly accurate results and no information concerning isomiRs and conserved miRNA-mRNA interaction sites.