In silico prediction of precursor microRNA in insects

Abstract

Pre-MicroRNAs are the hairpin loops from which microRNAs are produced that have been found to negatively regulate gene expression in several organisms. In insects, microRNAs participate in several biological processes including metamorphosis, reproduction, immune response, etc. Numerous tools have been designed in recent years to predict novel pre-microRNA using binary machine learning classifiers where prediction models are trained with true and pseudo pre-microRNA hairpin loops. Currently, there are no existing tool that is exclusively designed for insect pre-microRNA detection.