Identifying Human miRNA Target Sites via Learning the Interaction Patterns between miRNA and mRNA Segments.

miRNAs (microRNAs) target specific mRNA (messenger RNA) sites to regulate their translation expression. Although miRNA targeting can rely on seed region base pairing, animal miRNAs, including human miRNAs, typically cooperate with several cofactors, leading to various noncanonical pairing rules. Therefore, identifying the binding sites of animal miRNAs remains challenging. Because experiments for mapping miRNA targets are costly, computational methods are preferred for extracting potential miRNA-mRNA fragment binding pairs first. However, existing prediction tools can have significant false positives due to the prevalent noncanonical miRNA binding behaviors and the information-biased training negative sets that were used while constructing these tools. To overcome these obstacles, we first prepared an information-balanced miRNA binding pair ground-truth data set. A miRNA-mRNA interaction-aware model was then designed to help identify miRNA binding events. On the test set, our model (auROC = 94.4%) outperformed existing models by at least 2.8% in auROC. Furthermore, we showed that this model can suggest potential binding patterns for miRNA-mRNA sequence interacting pairs. Finally, we made the prepared data sets and the designed model available at http://cosbi2.ee.ncku.edu.tw/mirna_binding/download.

Assessing spontaneous baroreflex in aged with pulse-pulse intervals and pulse amplitudes.

Cardiac autonomic dysfunction is a serious condition in the elder subjects. Baroreflex sensitivity (BRS) by measuring pulse intervals and blood pressure has been proven as an effective indicator. This paper proposes a novel index by substitution blood pressure with amplitudes of pressure pulse. We recruited 61 subjects divided into two groups: healthy young subjects (Group1, n=33), healthy elders (Group2, n=28). The wrist pulse pressures of each subject were measured for 5 minutes to obtain pulse-pulse intervals and amplitudes then applied within the spontaneous sequence technique to calculate the pulse-pulse interval and amplitude ratio (PAR). We verified the reproducibility of PAR and agreement with spectral analysis of heart rate variability in group1 participants. We discovered significant differences between different groups in PAR (Group1 vs. Group2: 0.90 ± 0.42 vs. 0.62 ± 0.27, P=0.010). In contrast with measurements of BRS, this study proposes a simple approach without the necessity of blood pressure calibration or professional expertise to conduct measurements, thereby providing a convenient method for assessing autonomic function at home.