NcRNAppi—a tool for identifying disease-related miRNA and siRNA targeting pathways

Abstract

Currently, there are a number of databases which store microRNA (miRNA) information, and tools available which provide miRNA target prediction. In this article, we describe a novel web-based tool that integrate the miRNA-targeted mRNA data, protein-protein interactions (PPI) records, tissues, biochemical pathways, human disease and gene function information to establish a disease-related miRNA target pathway database. This database is unique in the sense that it links miRNA target genes with their PPI partners according to being tissue- and diseases-specific or both. The same approach is also applied to siRNA data. This database provides two types of searches: (i) tissue- and (ii) disease-specific miRNA (or siRNA) targeting pathways. The search allows one to identify tissue- or disease-specific miRNA (or siRNA) target gene's PPI partners two levels beyond. The release version 1.0 is a freely accessible database available at http://ncrnappi.cs.nthu.edu.tw and http://ncRNAppi.bioinfo.asia.edu.tw/.