[siRNAs with high specificity to the target: a systematic design by CRM algorithm]

Mol Biol (Mosk). 2008 Jan-Feb;42(1):163-71. doi: 10.1134/s0026893308010251.
[Article in Russian]

Abstract

'Off-target' silencing effect hinders the development of siRNA-based therapeutic and research applications. Common solution to this problem is an employment of the BLAST that may miss significant alignments or an exhaustive Smith-Waterman algorithm that is very time-consuming. We have developed a Comprehensive Redundancy Minimizer (CRM) approach for mapping all unique sequences ("targets") 9-to-15 nt in size within large sets of sequences (e.g. transcriptomes). CRM outputs a list of potential siRNA candidates for every transcript of the particular species. These candidates could be further analyzed by traditional "set-of-rules" types of siRNA designing tools. For human, 91% of transcripts are covered by candidate siRNAs with kernel targets of N = 15. We tested our approach on the collection of previously described experimentally assessed siRNAs and found that the correlation between efficacy and presence in CRM-approved set is significant (r = 0.215, p-value = 0.0001). An interactive database that contains a precompiled set of all human siRNA candidates with minimized redundancy is available at http://129.174.194.243. Application of the CRM-based filtering minimizes potential "off-target" silencing effects and could improve routine siRNA applications.

Publication types

  • English Abstract
  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Animals
  • Genome, Human / genetics*
  • Humans
  • Internet
  • Mice
  • RNA, Small Interfering / genetics*
  • Sequence Analysis, DNA / methods

Substances

  • RNA, Small Interfering