In silico evidence of the relationship between miRNAs and siRNAs

TL;DR

This study provides computational evidence supporting the functional similarity between siRNAs and miRNAs, suggesting that tools for predicting siRNA activity can also be applied to endogenous miRNAs, indicating potential interchangeability.

Contribution

The paper demonstrates through computational analysis that siRNA prediction models can effectively predict miRNA activity, supporting their functional equivalence.

Findings

High silencing levels assigned to human miRNAs by siRNA-trained models

Supports hypothesis of functional interchangeability between siRNAs and miRNAs

Computational tools for siRNAs can be used to study endogenous miRNAs

Abstract

Both short interfering RNAs (siRNAs) and microRNAs (miRNAs) mediate the repression of specific sequences of mRNA through the RNA interference pathway. In the last years several experiments have supported the hypothesis that siRNAs and miRNAs may be functionally interchangeable, at least in cultured cells. In this work we verify that this hypothesis is also supported by a computational evidence. We show that a method specifically trained to predict the activity of the exogenous siRNAs assigns a high silencing level to experimentally determined human miRNAs. This result not only supports the idea of siRNAs and miRNAs equivalence but indicates that it is possible to use computational tools developed using synthetic small interference RNAs to investigate endogenous miRNAs.