Mammalian microRNA prediction through a support vector machine model of sequence and structure.

ABSTRACT:

Background

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are endogenous small noncoding RNA gene products, on average 22 nt long, found in a wide variety of organisms. They play important regulatory roles by targeting mRNAs for degradation or translational repression. There are 377 known mouse miRNAs and 475 known human miRNAs in the May 2007 release of the miRBase database, the majority of which are conserved between the two species. A number of recent reports imply that it is likely that many mammalian miRNAs remain to be discovered. The possibility that there are more of them expressed at lower levels or in more specialized expression contexts calls for the exploitation of genome sequence information to accelerate their discovery.

Methodology/principal findings

In this article, we describe a comput

SUBMITTER: Sheng Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1978525 | biostudies-literature | 2007 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature