Regulatory roles of microRNA163 in responses to stresses in Arabidopsis.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small regulatory RNAs that participate in various biological processes by silencing target genes. In Arabidopsis, microRNA163 (miR163) was found to be involved in seed germination, root development, and biotic resistance. However, the regulatory roles of miR163 remain unclear.

Discovering unknown human and mouse transcription factor binding sites and their characteristics from ChIP-seq data.

Transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs) are essential for gene regulation, but the number of known TFBSs remains limited. We aimed to discover and characterize unknown TFBSs by developing a computational pipeline for analyzing ChIP-seq (chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by sequencing) data. Applying it to the latest ENCODE ChIP-seq data for human and mouse, we found that using the irreproducible discovery rate as a quality-control criterion resulted in many experiments being unnecessarily discarded.

miRgo: integrating various off-the-shelf tools for identification of microRNA-target interactions by heterogeneous features and a novel evaluation indicator.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are short non-coding RNAs that regulate gene expression and biological processes through binding to messenger RNAs. Predicting the relationship between miRNAs and their targets is crucial for research and clinical applications. Many tools have been developed to predict miRNA-target interactions, but variable results among the different prediction tools have caused confusion for users.