Evaluation of Bioinformatics Softwares for Prediction of Pre-miRNAs

Evaluation of Bioinformatics Softwares for Prediction of Pre-miRNAs

MicroRNAs or miRNAs are small non-coding RNAs that function as the common factors in post-transcriptional gene regulation. MiRNAs have paying attention ever-increasing importance in recent years. Since it is currently elusive to experimentally determine all possible miRNAs for an organism, bioinformatics methods for predicting the miRNA genes have gained approval. A number of bioinformatic tools have been devised to manage these predictions. In this study, we analyzed 11 miRNA prediction tools that are being used in several miRNA gene prediction researches, in order to assist investigators to choose the most proper tools for the miRNA gene prediction. For this, RNA secondary structure of 100 miRNAs which have been submitted to miRBase database was predicted by miRNA prediction tools. This was followed by comparison of these tools for prediction of these miRNAs as the real stem loop like to premiRNA. By testing these tools, the best results were obtained by FOMmiR, MIREval 2.0 and iMcRNA-ExPseSSC achieving 100% performance accuracy. However, this result doesn’t show a data about false positive and true negative predictions.