TarMiner: automatic extraction of miRNA targets from literature

Abstract

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small RNA molecules that target particular genes and prohibit their expression. Since many important diseases are related to the expression or non-expression of particular genes, knowing the miRNAs that affect these genes can help in finding possible treatments. In the last decade, a large amount of experimental studies trying to reveal the targets of several miRNAs has been published. A handful of curated databases that collect miRNA targets from the literature have been developed to make this information more easily available. However, due to the large number of existing published articles, maintaining these databases up-to-date is a tedious task that requires important resources. In this work we introduce TarMiner, a pipeline for automatic extraction of miRNA targets that can facilitate the curation process of databases that maintain miRNA validated targets.