A Method to Improve the Universality of SiRNA Design Rules Based on siRNA Efficiency Distribution

Effectual siRNA design is a pivotal question in RNAi research. However existing siRNA design guidelines are not very consistent with each other, and many have the limitation of universality, that is, many guidelines usually present poor predicting capability on independent siRNA datasets. In order to explore high universal siRNA design rules, first we collected as many siRNA valid data on various genes and species as possible and sampled the training datasets according to the distribution of siRNA efficiency in a nature state based on statistic principle. Then we performed two sets of analysis process in parallel adopting different statistical methods to explore the rules for functional siRNA design. Finally we tested the rules on internal and external test set. Test results indicated the functional siRNA design rules obtained by our analysis method had good predicting capability and universality.