Figure 1.

Procedure for miRNA prediction. The number of matches between a mRNA and a segment of the genome (micromatches) after each step is shown in parenthesis. mRNAs are compared with the genomic sequence to identify matching regions of 20–27 nucleotides with at most 2 mismatches. Matches overlapping annotated exons, repeats or low-complexity regions are discarded. Additionally, the miRNA:mRNA-duplexes must be stable and the potential miRNAs must have a structure similar to known miRNAs to be included in the base set predictions. The multi-target set is a more reliable subset of those that have more than one target. See text for more details.