Accepted_test

New bioinformatics pipeline revealed thousands of novel potential non-canonical binding sites for TDMD-regulated miRNAs in Drosophila

by Snitkin D.V. | Ryazansky S.S. | National Research Centre “Kurchatov Institute”, Moscow, Russia; National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia | National Research Centre “Kurchatov Institute”, Moscow, Russia

Abstract ID: 238

Event: BGRS-abstracts

Sections: [Sym 1] Section “Regulatory genomics”

During the miRNA-mediated gene silencing in animals, the binding of miRNAs with complementary mRNA targets through a ‘seed’ region at the 5’ end of miRNAs leads to the destruction or translational inhibition of the targets. However, recent high-throughput studies demonstrated that miRNAs mostly prefer to bind with RNA in a non-canonical way, in which the complementary pairings are also located outside the seed region. The biological functions of non-canonical interactions are mostly unknown. The exception is the so-called TDMD (target-directed miRNA degradation) sites, in which miRNA pairs with a target along its whole length with a bulge of several unpaired nucleotides in the middle. In our work, we developed the pipeline which allowed to detect 5.6k potential binding sites for TDMD-regulated miRNAs of Drosophila. The conducted detailed characterization of their structural features can be used in building a model for predicting of the Drosophila TDMD binding sites of miRNAs, which will allow us to get closer to understanding the miRNA biology in general.