March 15, 2007 (Vol. 27, No. 6)

URL:
http://microrna.sanger.ac.uk/index.shtml

Rating:
Strong Points: Ease of access
Weak Points: Nothing significant

Summary:
Back in my day, we had junk DNA and we had junk RNA. The latter were itty-bitty RNAs thought not to do much, but now it turns out they do a lot. Knowing my luck, junk DNA will have a similar outcome. Life was simpler then. MicroRNAs, it appears today, are involved in gene regulation. miRBase is a database spanning the range of these interesting molecules. The opening page of the site provides an interface that couldn’t be made much simpler. It has three selectable options—sequences (a list of all published sequences), targets (a list of target genes), and registry (a confidential service to assign names for novel miRNA genes prior to publication). Access to information is similar, and the information is useful. It doesn’t get much better than that.

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