Human microRNA target identification by RRSM

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small endogenously expressed non-coding RNAs that regulate target messenger RNAs in various biological processes. In recent years, there have been many studies concentrated on the discovery of new miRNAs and identification of their mRNA targets. Although researchers have identified many miRNAs, few miRNA targets have been identified by actual experimental methods. To expedite the identification of miRNA targets for experimental verification, in the literature approaches based on the sequence or microarray expression analysis have been established to discover the potential miRNA targets. In this study, we focus on the human miRNA target prediction and propose a generalized relative R-2 method (RRSM) to find many high-confidence targets. Many targets have been confirmed from previous studies. The targets for several miRNAs discovered by the HITS-CLIP method in a recent study have also been selected by our study. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.