How microRNAs choose their targets

The growing list of known microRNAs is only as useful as our ability to identify the mRNA targets they control. A new study stresses the role of messenger RNA structure in microRNA target recognition and suggests that binding of the RNA-induced silencing complex is largely controlled by the thermodynamics of RNA-RNA interactions.

[1]  C. Lawrence,et al.  Statistical prediction of single-stranded regions in RNA secondary structure and application to predicting effective antisense target sites and beyond. , 2001, Nucleic acids research.

[2]  Sam Griffiths-Jones,et al.  The microRNA Registry , 2004, Nucleic Acids Res..

[3]  R. Giegerich,et al.  Fast and effective prediction of microRNA/target duplexes. , 2004, RNA.

[4]  Y. Li,et al.  Incorporating structure to predict microRNA targets. , 2005, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[5]  Kristin C. Gunsalus,et al.  microRNA Target Predictions across Seven Drosophila Species and Comparison to Mammalian Targets , 2005, PLoS Comput. Biol..

[6]  Peter F. Stadler,et al.  Thermodynamics of RNA-RNA Binding , 2006, German Conference on Bioinformatics.

[7]  C. Burge,et al.  Conserved Seed Pairing, Often Flanked by Adenosines, Indicates that Thousands of Human Genes are MicroRNA Targets , 2005, Cell.

[8]  R. Aharonov,et al.  Identification of hundreds of conserved and nonconserved human microRNAs , 2005, Nature Genetics.

[9]  A. Hatzigeorgiou,et al.  TarBase: A comprehensive database of experimentally supported animal microRNA targets. , 2005, RNA.

[10]  Eugene Berezikov,et al.  Many novel mammalian microRNA candidates identified by extensive cloning and RAKE analysis. , 2006, Genome research.

[11]  Michael Kertesz,et al.  The role of site accessibility in microRNA target recognition , 2007, Nature Genetics.

[12]  Dang D. Long,et al.  Potent effect of target structure on microRNA function , 2007, Nature Structural &Molecular Biology.