Plant regulatory small RNAs (sRNA), including most of microRNAs (miRNAs) and a subset of small interfering RNAs (phasiRNAs), play important roles in gene expression regulation. Although being generated from genetically distinct biogenesis pathways, the regulatory sRNAs ranging from 20-22 nucleotides in length share the same mechanism that guides posttranscriptional gene silencing through mRNA degradation or translational inhibition.
The psRNATarget was specifically developed to identify target transcripts of these sRNAs through i) analyzing complementary matching between sRNA and target using a predefined scoring schema; and ii) evaluating target site accessibility by calculating unpaired energy (UPE). The 2017 update introduces an improved scoring schema (V2, 2017 release) which are capable of discovering more miRNA-target pair without significant increase in final output based on our benchmark test using curated dataset. In addtion, the new psRNATarget is capable of uploading ‘big’ data through enabling resumable and chunked uploading using HTML5 API of browser.