Integrated sequence-structure motifs suffice to identify microRNA precursors.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Upwards of 1200 miRNA loci have hitherto been annotated in the human genome. The specific features defining a miRNA precursor and deciding its recognition and subsequent processing are not yet exhaustively described and miRNA loci can thus not be computationally identified with sufficient confidence.

Results

We rendered pre-miRNA and non-pre-miRNA hairpins as strings of integrated sequence-structure information, and used the software Teiresias to identify sequence-structure motifs (ss-motifs) of variable length in these data sets. Using only ss-motifs as features in a Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm for pre-miRNA identification achieved 99.2% specificity and 97.6% sensitivity on a human test data set, which is comparable to previously published algorithms e

SUBMITTER: Liu X 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3305290 | biostudies-literature | 2012

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature