Biomedical background and challenges

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) constitute an abundant class of functional ~22nt. long RNA molecules, which play a key role in gene regulation at the post-transcriptional level.

Experimental evidence shows that RNA triplexes, composed of miRNA pairs binding in close proximity or with partial overlap to a common target mRNA, exert stronger repressive effect compared to that achieved by single miRNAs.

The presence of miRNAs can be correlated with the progression of known diseases. To investigate their regulatory effect, we provided an interactive functionality to navigate known metabolic pathways and highlight targets of cooperative miRNAs. This feature allows researchers to identify and test disease-specific miRNAs, which could be used as biomarkers in diagnosis and prognosis of known diseases.

Some use cases

The TriplexRNA has been used to:

• Design a p73-mediated network for the development of next generation therapeutics.
  Logotheti et al., Springer Nature, 2019

• Experimentally validate cooperating miRNA-mediated E2F1 repression in chemorisistant tumor cells.
  Lai et al., Theranostics, 2018

• Design experimentally feasible miRNA-based circuits for real-world in-situ cells classification.
  Mohammadi et al., Cells Systems, 2017)

• Experimentally validate the concerted regulation of DMPK by putatively cooperating miRNA pairs.
  Koscianska et al., NAR, 2015