TY - JOUR T1 - An alternative class of targets for microRNAs containing CG dinucleotide JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/026708 SP - 026708 AU - Zheng Yan AU - Bin Zhang AU - Haiyang Hu AU - Gangcai Xie AU - Song Guo AU - Philipp Khaitovich AU - Yi-Ping Phoebe Chen Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/02/28/026708.abstract N2 - Background MicroRNAs are endogenous ∼23nt RNAs which regulate mRNA targets mainly through perfect pairing with their seed region (positions 2-7). Several instances of bulge UTR sequence can also be recognized by miRNA as their target. But such non-Watson-Crick base pairings are incompletely understood.Results We found a group of miRNAs which had very few conservative targets while potentially having a subclass of bulge message RNA targets. Compared with the canonical target, these bulge targets had a lower negative correlation with the miRNA expression, and either were downregulated in the miRNA overexpression experiment or upregulated in the miRNA knock-down experiment.Conclusions We proved that the bulge target exists widely in certain groups of miRNAs and such non-canonical targets can be recoginized by miRNA. Incorporating these bulge targets, combined with evolutionary conservation, will reduce the false-positive rate of microRNA computational target prediction. ER -