Integrated miRNA expression analysis and target prediction

Abstract

The accurate prediction of microRNA targets is essential to understanding their function. Commonly used software produces a prohibitive number of predicted targets for each microRNA. Here, we describe procedures that refine these predictions by integrating available software and expression data from experiments available online. These procedures are tailored to experiments, where predicting true targets is more important than detecting all putative targets. Our approach is tailored to the experimental biologist who seeks to identify a workable set of putative microRNA target genes for further characterization. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.