Purpose: microRNA (miRNA) regulates diverse biological mechanisms and metabolisms in plants and animals. Thus, the discoveries of miRNA has revolutionized the life sciences and medical research.The miRNA represses and cleaves the targeted mRNA by binding perfect or near perfect or imperfect complementary base pairs by RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC) formation during biogenesis process. One miRNA interacts with one or more mRNA genes and vice versa, hence takes part in causing various diseases. In this paper, the different microRNA target databases and their functional annotations developed by various researchers have been reviewed. The concurrent research review aims at comprehending the significance of miRNA and presenting the existing status of annotated miRNA target resources built by researchers henceforth discovering the knowledge for diagnosis and prognosis.
Methods and results: This review discusses the applications and developmental methodologies for constructing target database as well as the utility of user interface design. An integrated architecture is drawn and a graphically comparative study of present status of miRNA targets in diverse diseases and various biological processes is performed. These databases comprise of information such as miRNA target-associated disease, transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs) in miRNA genomic locations, polymorphism in miRNA target, A-to-I edited target, Gene Ontology (GO), genome annotations, KEGG (Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes) pathways, target expression analysis, TF-miRNA and miRNA-mRNA interaction networks, drugs-targets interactions, etc.
Conclusion: miRNA target databases contain diverse experimentally and computationally predicted target through various algorithms. The comparison of various miRNA target database has been performed on various parameters. The computationally predicted target databases suffer from false positive information as there is no common theory for prediction of miRNA targets. The review conclusion emphasizes the need of more intelligent computational improvement for the miRNA target identification, their functional annotations and datasbase development.
Keywords: Bioinformatics; Biomarker; Data mining; Genome; High-throughput; Pathology.