Modeling Of Mirnas

Question

[Payal]

Is homology modelling of miRNAs gives meaningful outputs??

Answer 1

[Chris Evelo]

Yes, homology modelling of miRNAs does give meaningful results and is in fact both used in finding them in (closely related species) and in target prediction across species. As usually with homology approaches you need to be careful.

Some tools combine homology searches with functional miRNA evaluations. For instance miRNAminer http://groups.csail.mit.edu/pag/mirnaminer/

[Payal]

thanku @chris. is the same concept goes with long non coding RNAs too?

[Chris Evelo]

To be honest I don't know. But one aspect you might want to consider is that when you find conservation to be high the sequencing you are looking at is more likely to be functional. That can be an important piece of information.

[Pappu]

Homology modeling will not be useful for most of the RNAs because only few RNA structures are available.