siRNA pro 2.0:An Online Tool for Rational Design of siRNA

As an important tool of gene function studies and clinical therapy,siRNA has drawn extensive attentions in the biomedical research fields.After the discovery of RNA interference phenomenon in 1998,numerous researchers have closely investigated the mechanism of siRNA and attempted to formulate the rules for siRNA designs which have already been adopted in many siRNA designing programs.The outcome of siRNA design has been dramatically improved by the rational siRNA design rules summarized by Reynolds,et al.since 2004.The Bioinformatics Centre of South China University of Technology has built a siRNA designing system "siRNA pro" in 2003.Currently,to provide better services for the siRNA-related researches,an update of this program which is based on the latest developments of the designing rules is urgently demanded.siRNA pro 2.0,which has combined and taken advantages of the basic empirical rules,the rational design rules,the target mRNA accessibility rules the siRNA duplex thermodynamics rules,and the siRNA specificity rules,will ultimately help investigators to obtain highly effective and specific siRNA designs.