MicroRNA Targetomes

The discovery of microRNAs (miRNAs) and their regulation of mRNAs uncovered a genome-wide mechanism of gene regulation.

It initiated intense efforts to identify the mRNA targets of miRNAs, which have been partly successful for many miRNAs using sequence-based prediction tools. However, miRNAs often have non-canonical functions, and to help identify these we developed an RNA chemistry (external pageAngew Chem 2013call_made) to capture by cross-linking all mRNA binding partners of a miRNA in cells (external pageNat Chem Biol 2015call_made).

Indeed, this approach revealed new roles of some miRNAs, including an exciting interplay between two families of tumor suppressor and oncogenic miRNAs.

We continue developing chemistry and biology of miR-CLIP since there is still no good experimental method to identify miRNA "targetomes" and the technology may be of value in characterizing novel interactions of other non-coding RNAs.