UNIT 12.14 DIANA-TarBase and DIANA Suite Tools: Studying Experimentally Supported microRNA Targets

Abstract

microRNAs (miRNAs) are short non-coding RNAs (∼22 nts) present in animals, plants, and viruses. They are considered central post-transcriptional regulators of gene expression and are key components in a great number of physiological and pathological conditions. The accurate characterization of their targets is considered essential to a series of applications and basic or applied research settings. DIANA-TarBase (http://www.microrna.gr/tarbase) was initially launched in 2006. It is a reference repository indexing experimentally derived miRNA-gene interactions in different cell types, tissues, and conditions across numerous species. This unit focuses on the study of experimentally supported miRNA-gene interactions, as well as their functional interpretation through the use of available tools in the DIANA suite (http://www.microrna.gr). The proposed use-case scenarios are presented in protocols, describing how to utilize the DIANA-TarBase database and DIANA-microT-CDS server and perform miRNA-targeted pathway analysis with DIANA-miRPath-v3. All analyses are directly invoked or initiated from DIANA-TarBase. © 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.