CHAPTER 5
PREDICTING MICRORNA PROSTATE CANCER TARGET GENES
5.1 INTRODUCTION
MicroRNAs (or miRNAs) are a class of noncoding RNA (RNA) of 18–25 nucleotides (nt) in length regulating gene expression that were first described in 1993 by Lee et al. [1], while the term RNA was first introduced in 2001 [2]. The miRNAs are capable of base pairing with imperfect complementarity to the transcripts of animal protein-coding genes (also termed targets), usually within the 3′ untranslated region ({3′}–UTR). The miRNAs are involved in several biological and metabolic pathways and play a very important role in many diseases (e.g., cancer [3], alzheimer’s disease [4], Parkinson’s disease [5], and viral infections [6]).
Because animal miRNAs form base pairing with imperfect complementarity, computational prediction of miRNA targets is not an easy task, and nowadays many miRNA target prediction programs have been developed and applied.
The Mirecords website available at (http://mirecords.umn.edu/miRecords/) shows a continuously updated list of biologically validated gene targets of known RNAs in humans and other animals (as reported by the scientific literature) together with the RNA target predictions obtained by various target prediction programs. This list tells us that much more work must be done in order to obtain reliable RNA target prediction methods. The reason is because (1) at present there are target genes biologically validated that ...
