Pitipol Meemak, Amornrat Phongdara, Wilaiwan Chotigeat, and Martti T. Tammi

pp. 143 - 148

Abstract

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a distinct class of small non-coding RNAs, ~22 nt long, found in a wide variety of organisms.
They play important regulatory roles by silencing gene activities at the post-transcriptional level. In this work, we developed
a computational workflow to identify conserved miRNA genes in the 10,536 unique Penaeus monodon expressed sequence
tags (ESTs). After removing all simple repeats and coding regions in the ESTs, the workflow uses both the conservation
of miRNA sequences and several filters obtained from pre-miRNA secondary structure properties to identify conserved
miRNAs. Finally, we discovered six potential conserved miRNA genes such as mir-4152, mir-466k, miR-32*, lin-4, mir-1346 and
mir-4310.