MicroRNAs are an abundant class of small regulatory RNA molecules about 19-22 nucleotides (nt) in length. They have been predicted to regulate the expression of more than 60% of mammalian genes and play fundamental roles in most biological processes including diseases. Incorporated into one member of the Argonaute (AGO) protein family in the RNA induced silencing complex (RISC), a mature miRNA binds typically to the 3' untranslated region (3' UTR) of the targeted messenger RNA (mRNA) and inhibits its translation via various mechanisms. The key determinant of the target recognition is a short sequence homology between the miRNA seed sequence (the 2nd-7th nucleotides of the miRNAs) and the targeted mRNA.
Cross-linking immunoprecipitation (CLIP) using AGO specific antibodies has been used to experimentally identify the AGO bound transcriptome that includes transcripts which are possibly targeted by miRNAs. However, identifying the actual miRNA which is incorporated into AGO still needs to be determined. To this end we developed miRTar2GO, a method that predicts miRNA targets by allocating CLIPed regions of the mRNA 3' UTRs to miRNA seed regions. miRTar2GO ranks the interactions predicted for a miRNA based on its distance to the verified interactions of that miRNA. The web-based UI allows user to download the query result as well as miRTar2GO prediction result as a whole.
The result of all queries, as well as the complete prediction result datasets can be exported by the user for further data analysis. For comments or questions, please contact Alireza at ALIREZA.AHADI@UTS.EDU.AU. If you make use of the result of our web server, please cite our publication.
NEW: Analysis of the user's personal CLIP-Seq to find microRNA targets is also provided upon request (more in documentation page).