Discovery of MicroRNA conservative sites in drosophila melanogaster

MicroRNAs(MiRNAs) are ~22nt non-coding RNAs which regulate gene expression in numerous species. Several computational approaches have been conducted to predict precursor miRNA secondary structure, discover target gene and study miRNA regulatory mechanism. However, there are few studies for analyzing mature miRNA sites. This paper proposes a novel framework, based on information entropy, to discover mature miRNA site. The structure information and sequence information are both taken into account. The important degree of sites is evaluated by information entropy. A lower information entropy usually means the miRNA site is more conservative. The experimental results indicate that our approach is useful to identify mature miRNA sites.