Abstract
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of small RNAs that post-transcriptionally regulate gene expression in animals and plants. The recent rapid advancement in miRNA biology, including high-throughput sequencing of small RNA libraries, inspired the development of a bioinformatics software, miRAuto, which predicts putative miRNAs in model plant genomes computationally. Furthermore, miRAuto enables users to identify miRNAs in non-model plant species whose genomes have yet to be fully sequenced. miRAuto analyzes the expression of the 5′-end position of mapped small RNAs in reference sequences to prevent the possibility of mRNA fragments being included as candidate miRNAs. We validated the utility of miRAuto on a small RNA dataset, and the results were compared to other publicly available miRNA prediction programs. In conclusion, miRAuto is a fully automated user-friendly tool for predicting miRNAs from small RNA sequencing data in both model and non-model plant species. miRAuto is available at http://nature.snu.ac.kr/software/miRAuto.htm.
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Lee, J., Kim, Di., Park, J.H. et al. miRAuto: An automated user-friendly MicroRNA prediction tool utilizing plant small RNA sequencing data. Mol Cells 35, 342–347 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10059-013-0019-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10059-013-0019-8