Title: Optimisation of miRNA-mRNA relationship prediction using biological features

Authors: Jasjit K. Banwait; Hesham H. Ali; Dhundy R. Bastola

Addresses: College of Information Science and Technology, University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, NE, USA ' College of Information Science and Technology, University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, NE, USA ' College of Information Science and Technology, University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, NE, USA

Abstract: MicroRNAs are small (approx. 22nt) non-coding RNAs that regulate the expression of genes by either degrading messenger-RNA (mRNA) that has already been transcribed or by repressing the translation of mRNA, thus inhibiting protein production. This mechanism of gene regulation by binding of the miRNA to 3-prime-untranslated region of target mRNAs has been recently discovered. This sequence-specific post-transcriptional gene regulation process affects large set of genes involved in number of biological pathways. Mapping of 7nt long miRNA seed sequence to the target gene has been a standard way of predicting miRNA targets. In this study, we develop a framework to enrich the human miRNA-mRNA relationship based on genomic and structural information.

Keywords: gene regulation; microRNA; miRNA targets; non-coding RNAs; target prediction; systems biology; functional analysis; optimisation; miRNA-mRNA relationships; relationship prediction; biological features; binding.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCBDD.2014.058587

International Journal of Computational Biology and Drug Design, 2014 Vol.7 No.1, pp.45 - 60

Published online: 21 Oct 2014 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article