Given the far-reaching implication of microRNA regulation in human health, novel bioinformatics tools are desired to facilitate the mechanistic understanding of microRNA mediated gene regulation and its regulatory roles in human disease development. Most state-of-the-art computational methods focus on the functional inference through identifying microRNA targets and none has comprehensively investigated the functional similarity among microRNAs. We have developed a new method to quantitatively measure the functional relevance among microRNAs that is solely based on the Gene Ontology and integrated functional annotation data from public pathways and PFam gene databases. We have demonstrated the use of the derived microRNA pairwise similarities to investigate the cooperative microRNA modules and construct the genome-scale microRNA mediated gene network in human. The complete results and the similarity assessment system can be freely accessed at (http://sbbi.unl.edu/microRNASim)
Han JC, Shu J, Cui J#. A New System For Human MicroRNA Functional Evaluation and Network Construction. IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM), Shengzhen, China, 15 - 18 December 2016.2016