Plant microRNA (miRNA) has an important role in controlling gene regulation in various biological processes such as cell development, signal transduction, and environmental responses. While information on plant miRNAs and their targets is widely available, accessible online plant miRNA resources are limited; most of them are intended for economically important crops or plant model organisms. With abundant sequence data of numerous plants in public databases such as NCBI and PlantGDB, the identification of their miRNAs and targets would benefit researchers as a central resource for the comparative studies of plant miRNAs. MicroPC (µPC) is the first online resource that enables users with the inclusive comparing and predicting plant miRNAs and miRNA targets across plant species and classification. The µPC consists of comprehensive data of miRNAs and their targets resulted from computational identification of Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs) in large-scale. In addition, it is incorporated with previously reported miRNAs from miRBase. The µPC offers three main utilities. First, the comparative utility enables users to compare stored mature or precursor miRNAs and user-supplied sequences among plant species. Second, the search utility allows users to access the predicted miRNAs and their targets in detail. Third, the prediction utility provides interactive steps for determining a miRNA or miRNA targets from an input nucleotide sequence and links the prediction results to their homologs in the µPC. MicroPC is freely available at http://www.biotec.or.th/isl/micropc.

Publications:

• Wuttichai Mhuanthong, Duangdao Wichadakul, "MicroPC (µPC): A comprehensive resource for predicting and comparing plant microRNAs," BMC Genomics, 10, 1 [Web Link]

Previous Work:

•   Plant miRNA Database (PmiD)