A high-precision rule-based extraction system for expanding geospatial metadata in GenBank records.

Objective: The metadata reflecting the location of the infected host (LOIH) of virus sequences in GenBank often lacks specificity. This work seeks to enhance this metadata by extracting more specific geographic information from related full-text articles and mapping them to their latitude/longitudes using knowledge derived from external geographical databases.

Materials And Methods: We developed a rule-based information extraction framework for linking GenBank records to the latitude/longitudes of the LOIH.

3'LIFE: a functional assay to detect miRNA targets in high-throughput.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are short non-coding RNAs that regulate gene output at the post-transcriptional level by targeting degenerate elements primarily in 3'untranslated regions (3'UTRs) of mRNAs. Individual miRNAs can regulate networks of hundreds of genes, yet for the majority of miRNAs few, if any, targets are known. Misexpression of miRNAs is also a major contributor to cancer progression, thus there is a critical need to validate miRNA targets in high-throughput to understand miRNAs' contribution to tumorigenesis.