milRNApredictor User Manual (Version 1.0.0)

December 4 2019


About This Program

MicroRNA-like small RNAs (milRNAs) with length of 21~22 nucleotides are a type of small non-coding RNAs that are firstly found in Neurospora crassa in 2010. Identifying milRNAs of species without genomic information is a difficult problem. In this article, a set of knowledge-based energy features is proposed to identify milRNAs by tactfully incorporating k-mer scheme in bioinformatics and distance-dependent pair potential in statistical physics. Compared with k-mer scheme, features developed here can alleviate the inherent curse of dimensionality in k-scheme once k becomes large. In addition, milRNApredictor built on novel features performs comparably to k-mer scheme, and achieves precision of 75.34%, accuracy of 74.96%, sensitivity of 74.21%, and specificity of 75.72% based on 10-fold cross-validation. Furthermore, for novel miRNA prediction, there exists high overlap of results from milRNApredictor and state-of-the-art mirnovo. However, milRNApredictor is simpler and more flexible to use with reduced requirements of input data and dependencies. Taken together, milRNApredictor can be used to de novo identify milRNAs and other very short small RNAs of non-model organisms, without information of precursor and genome. Finally, the local software is freely available to the academic community.

 


Input, output, dependencies, and platforms of milRNApredictor

All necessary scripts and data are contained in the package. MilRNApredictor can run both on Windows and Linux platforms. Perl (v5.24.1), R (v3.2.2) and randomForest R package (v4.6-14), with the recommended versions in parentheses, are required to preinstall in local machines. MilRNApredictor receives a FASTA-formatted input file containing nucleotide sequences. The predicted label and corresponding score for each sample can be found in the output file of milRNApredictor.

 


Run

Unzip the package of milRNApredictor, and then enter the directory of milRNApredictor.

You need to call milRNApredictor.pl from inside the milRNApredictor directory!

 

perl milRNApredictor.pl -P <postive FASTA> -N <negative FASTA> -T <test FASTA>

 


Availability

Our softwares are freely available for academic researches. For non-profit users, you can copy, distribute and use the softwares for your scientific studies. Our softwares are not free for commercial usage.

For ordering information please please contact us.

 


Citation

If the software has been helpful for your work, we wish you could cite the article.

 


Contacting the Author

We'd like to hear your questions and comments!

If you are having trouble getting your executable to run, please contact Dr. Yuangen Yao by E-mail: yyg@mail.hzau.edu.cn

Department of Physics, College of Science, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, Hubei 430070, China