ABSTRACT
MicroRNAs (miRNA) are small non-protein-coding RNAs with important roles in animal development and disease. While some miRNAs are abundantly expressed and can be cloned easily, others show a temporal and tissue-specific expression pattern that makes them harder to identify. This creates the need for computational methods to predict miRNA genes. This chapter presents the basis for such algorithms and provides a guide to both conservation-based and nonconservation-based miRNA prediction algorithms.
