Computational Tools for Genome-Wide miRNA Prediction and Study

摘要

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are single-stranded non-coding RNA susually of 22 nucleotidesin length that play animportant post-transcriptional regulation role in many organisms. MicroRNAs bind a seed sequence to the 3'-untranslatedregion (UTR) region of the target messenger RNA (mRNA), inducing degradation or inhibition of translation andresulting in a reduction in the protein level. This regulatory mechanism is central to many biological processes andperturbation could lead to diseases such as cancer. Given the biological importance, of miRNAs, there is a great need toidentify and study their targets and functions. However, miRNAs are very difficult to clone in the lab and this hashindered the identification of novel miRNAs. Next-generation sequencing coupled with new computational tools hasrecently evolved to help researchers efficiently identify large numbers of novel miRNAs. In this review, we describerecent miRNA prediction tools and discuss their priorities, advantages and disadvantages.