Nucleic Acids Research Advance Access originally published online on May 25, 2009
Nucleic Acids Research 2009 37(Web Server issue):W266-W272; doi:10.1093/nar/gkp412
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Nucleic Acids Research, 2009, Vol. 37, No. suppl_2 W266-W272
© 2009 The Author(s)
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Articles |
MirZ: an integrated microRNA expression atlas and target prediction resource
1Biozentrum, Universität Basel and Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Klingelbergstrasse 50-70, 4056 Basel, 2Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz, Schulthess-Allee 1, 5201 Brugg, Switzerland, 3Fachhochschule Hagenberg, Softwarepark 11, 4232 Hagenberg, Austria and 4Institut für Informatik, Universität Leipzig, Härtelstr. 16-18 04107 Leipzig, Germany
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +41 61 267 1577; Fax: +41 61 267 1584; Email: mihaela.zavolan{at}unibas.ch
Received March 3, 2009. Revised April 25, 2009. Accepted May 2, 2009.
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are short RNAs that act as guides for the degradation and translational repression of protein-coding mRNAs. A large body of work showed that miRNAs are involved in the regulation of a broad range of biological functions, from development to cardiac and immune system function, to metabolism, to cancer. For most of the over 500 miRNAs that are encoded in the human genome the functions still remain to be uncovered. Identifying miRNAs whose expression changes between cell types or between normal and pathological conditions is an important step towards characterizing their function as is the prediction of mRNAs that could be targeted by these miRNAs. To provide the community the possibility of exploring interactively miRNA expression patterns and the candidate targets of miRNAs in an integrated environment, we developed the MirZ web server, which is accessible at www.mirz.unibas.ch. The server provides experimental and computational biologists with statistical analysis and data mining tools operating on up-to-date databases of sequencing-based miRNA expression profiles and of predicted miRNA target sites in species ranging from Caenorhabditis elegans to Homo sapiens.