miRNAtools

February 2, 2010

miRNAtools
This page is a compilation of several tools to analyze miRNA sequences, determine their targets and to analyze their possible roles in cellular metabolism. The user can follow TUTORIALS that show how to extract information on miRNA function by using real and theoretical examples.

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MicroRNAs…not fossils

February 2, 2010

The last ancestor we shared with worms lived 600 million years ago and may already have had a sophisticated brain that released hormones into the blood and was connected to various sensory organs. The evidence comes not from a newly found fossil, but from the study of microRNAs in a group of animals alive today [...]

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How many unique mature human miRNAs are there?

January 29, 2010

The results of the last poll are in…
Considering that the current miRBase version 14 includes 894 unique mature human miRNAs – how many are there really in us? 74% of our readers believe that there are more than 1000 miRNAs. So, let’s discover the rest…

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microRNA of the Week: microRNA-146a

January 29, 2010

While it is clear now that microRNAs play an important regulatory role in nearly all areas of biology, what may be more interesting is the breath of function of just a single microRNA.  It is estimated that microRNAs regulate up to 60% of all genes and some say that “each microRNA can target hundreds of [...]

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Regulus, Alnylam and Isis Announce U.S. Allowance of Tuschl III Patent Application Covering miR-21

January 25, 2010

Business Wire 1/25/09
The newly allowed claims cover miR-21, a microRNA that has been linked to a variety of diseases, including cancer, fibrosis, and heart disease. The claims additionally encompass single-stranded and double-stranded antisense compounds complementary to miR-21. The allowance of this second Tuschl III patent in the U.S. extends the scope of this patent estate, [...]

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Deep Sequencing – a Tool for Novel microRNA Discovery in Many Species

January 8, 2010

One of the limitations of microarray expression profiling is the requirement of prior sequence information, to be used for probe design.  Until recently, this has been limited mostly to that found in public databases (i.e. miRBase), these data having been gathered mainly through a combination of bioinformatics and extensive cloning experiments.  In contrast, deep sequencing [...]

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Site Poll Results

January 7, 2010

The question was: “How do you like our site?”
The result:
A total of 15 votes were cast and a whooping 80% are happy with the site. I guess, this means we will be doing more of the same

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Upcoming Scheduled Maintenance, New Features & Numbers

December 28, 2009

For a change some housekeeping:

Blog will be down Dec. 31st 2009 – back (latest) January 2nd 2010
New Feature: miRNA related polls coming (weekly or biweekly)
Visitor stats: ~5000 unique visitors in last 14 months

I started this site Nov. 2008 and over the last couple of months I delayed a some maintenance issues thinking the holiday season would [...]

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Web-Based Tools for MicroRNA Analysis from Deep Sequencing Data

December 23, 2009

mirTools – a web server for microRNA profiling and discovery based on high-throughput sequencing data.
Classification of the large-scale short reads into known categories, such as known miRNAs, non-coding RNA, genomic repeats or coding sequences.
Providing a detailed annotation information of known miRNAs, such as miRNA/miRNA*, absolute/relative reads count and the most abundant tag.
Discovery of the novel [...]

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Using microRNAs to understand cancer biology

December 22, 2009

Invited Comment – by Joanne Weidhaas
MicroRNAs are non-coding RNA species that have a crucial role in growth, development, and cell death and differentiation. Since the initial groundbreaking discovery that these tiny cellular shepherds were aberrantly expressed in cancer, there has been an explosion in the study of microRNAs in cancer risk, development, biology, and outcome. As [...]

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