imiRTP: An Integrated Method to Identifying miRNA-target Interactions in Arabidopsis thaliana

MiRNA are about 22nt long small noncoding RNAs that post transcriptionally regulate gene expression in animals, plants and protozoa. Confident identification of MiRNA-Target Interactions (MTI) is vital to understand their function. Currently, several integrated programs and databases are available for animal miRNAs, the mechanisms of which are significantly different from plant miRNAs. Here we present imiRTP, an integrated MTI prediction and analysis toolkit for Arabidopsis thaliana. It features two important functions: (i) combination of several effective plant miRNA target prediction methods provides a sufficiently large MTI candidate set, and (ii) different filters allow for an efficient selection of potential targets. The modularity of imiRTP enables the prediction of high quality targets on genome-wide scale.