miRTour: Plant miRNA and target prediction tool

Abstract

UNLABELLED MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are important negative regulators of gene expression in plant and animals, which are endogenously produced from their own genes. Computational comparative approach based on evolutionary conservation of mature miRNAs has revealed a number of orthologs of known miRNAs in different plant species. The homology-based plant miRNA discovery, followed by target prediction, comprises several steps, which have been done so far manually. Here, we present the bioinformatics pipeline miRTour which automates all the steps of miRNA similarity search, miRNA precursor selection, target prediction and annotation, each of them performed with the same set of input sequences. AVAILABILITY The database is available for free at http://bio2server.bioinfo.uni-plovdiv.bg/miRTour/