MiRPI: Portable Software to Identify Conserved miRNAs, Targets and to Calculate Precursor Statistics

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are recently discovered small RNA molecules usually resulting in translational repression and gene silencing. Despite the fact that specific cloning of small RNA's is a method in practice, computational identification of miRNA's has been a major focus recent days, since is a rapid process following AB initio and sequence alignment methods. Here we developed new software called MiRPI that aims to identify the highly conserved miRNAs without any mismatches from given fasta formatted gene sequences by using non-repeated miRNA dataset of the user's interest. The new window embedded with the software is used to identify the targets for inputted mature miRNAs in the mRNA sequences. Also MiRPI is designed to measure the precursor miRNA statistics, majorly focusing the Adjusted Minimum Folding free Energy (AMFE) and Minimum Folding free Energy Index (MFEI), the most important parameters in miRNA confirmation. MiRPI is developed by PERL (Practical Extraction and Report Language) and Tk (Tool kit widgets) scripting languages. It is user friendly, portable offline software that works in all windows OS, sized to 3 MB.

SSR-Primer Generator: A Tool for Finding Simple Sequence Repeats and Designing SSR-Primers

Simple sequence repeats (SSRs) are ubiquitous short tandem duplications found within eukaryotic genomes. Their length variability and abundance throughout the genome has led them to be widely used as molecular markers for crop-breeding programs, facilitating the use of marker-assisted selection as well as estimation of genetic population structure. Here, we report a software application, "SSR-Primer Generator" for SSR discovery, SSR-primer design, and homology-based search of in silico amplicons from a DNA sequence dataset. On submission of multiple FASTA-format DNA sequences, those analyses are batch processed in a Java runtime environment (JRE) platform, in a pipeline, and the resulting data are visualized in HTML tabular format. This application will be a useful tool for reducing the time and costs associated with the development and application of SSR markers.