辨識人類微小核甘酸標的基因之系統化方法

Abstract

microRNA是一小段可在生物體內自行合成的RNA序列，其主要的功能是藉由與其target結合來控制基因的表現。近年來，越來越多的microRNA透過生物實驗被發現。目前已經有許多針對找尋microRNA target的預測軟體開發出來，像是miRanda、RNAhybrid、TargetScan和PicTar等都是常見的microRNA target預測軟體，這些軟體所用的預測方式都不一樣，很難評斷哪一個軟體的預測結果準確性較高。因此，為了提高microRNA target預測的準確性，在本研究中，我們提供了一個系統化的microRNA target分析流程。其中我們結合了三個比較廣泛被使用的microRNA target預測軟體，miRanda、RNAhybrid、TargetScan來預測microRNA target，並從一群已經過實驗證實的microRNA target資料中觀察一些共同的特徵當作過濾的條件，另外還收集了一些microRNA及其target的microarray資訊輔助我們的預測結果。藉由本研究所提供的流程可讓生物學家更方便、快速的找到正確的microRNA target。

microRNA (miRNA) is a class of small non-coding RNA and the main function of miRNA is to regulate mRNA stability and translation by binding to specific target site of mRNA. Recently, more and more miRNA targets have been discovered by experiments. However, the experimental identification of miRNA target site is lab-intensive. Although there are several computational programs have been developed, such as miRanda, RNAhybrid, TargetScan and PicTar, for identifying miRNA targets. The main method of these programs are different, it’s hard to define which tool has better performance. Therefore, in this work, to improve the accuracy of miRNA target prediction, we proposed a systematic method for identifying miRNA targets in human genome. We applied three commonly used programs to make predictions. Besides, we also define several useful criteria by observing the experimentally verified miRNA targets which are retrieved from TarBase to filter prediction results. Moreover, we also collected both miRNAs and its targets gene expression profiles to support our prediction results. Using this systematic method we proposed can help biologists to find miRNA targets more convenient and accurate.