How does the microRNA expression work?
top Genehub-GEPIS can report miRNA expression based on EST data. This was motivated from the observation that miRNA precursor sequences can be found among ESTs ( Smalheiser, 2003, Zhang et al., 2005 ), and that pri-miRNA expression levels correlate with mature miRNA expression levels ( Thomson et al., 2006 ). Given this relationship, we could use EST data to approximate miRNA expression levels in various tissues. This was computed using the following steps: 1) We collected genomic locations of the miRNA stem-loop sequences from version 9.0 of miRBase; 2) We then obtained all EST sequences that had any overlap with the miRNA stem-loops; and finally 3) We computed the GEPIS results as described. These data can be explored from the Text Search interface by miRNA name or by the miRBase accession number.
