Abstract

　　Recent works have demonstrated that microRNAs (miRNAs) are involved in critical biological processes by suppressing the translation of coding genes. In order to facilitate the investigation of microRNA regulation, several biological databases and computational tools were developed previously. In this talk, I will briefly introduce the following databases and tools for Bioinformatics research in miRNA regulation: (1) miRNAMap (Nucl Acids Res, 2006, Nucl Acids Res, 2008): an integrated resource to collect experimentally verified microRNAs and both known and putative miRNA target genes in human, mouse, rat and other metazoan genomes; (2) ViTa (Nucl Acids Res, 2007): a database of host microRNA targets on viruses; (3) miRStart: a resource to collect transcriptional start sites (promoters) of miRNAs; (4) miRNA Target Prediction: three computational tools, miRanda, RNAhybrid and TargetScan. (5) miRExpress: an effective tool to generate miRNA expression profiles from second-generation sequencing data. (6) RNALogo (Nucl Acids Res, 2008): a new display of structural RNA family.