MTide: An integrated tool for the identification of miRNA-target interaction in plants

Abstract

Motivation: Small RNA sequencing and degradome sequencing (also known as parallel analysis of RNA ends) have provided rich information on the microRNA (miRNA) and its cleaved mRNA targets on a genome-wide scale in plants, but no computational tools have been developed to effectively and conveniently deconvolute the miRNA-target interaction (MTI). Results: A freely available package, MTide, was developed by combining modified miRDeep2 and CleaveLand4 with some other useful scripts to explore MTI in a comprehensive way. By searching for targets of a complete miRNAs, we can facilitate large-scale identification of miRNA targets, allowing us to discover regulatory interaction networks.