PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Vikram Agarwal
AU  - Alexander O. Subtelny
AU  - Prathapan Thiru
AU  - Igor Ulitsky
AU  - David P. Bartel
TI  - Predicting microRNA targeting efficacy in Drosophila
AID  - 10.1101/198689
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 198689
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/10/05/198689.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/10/05/198689.full
AB  - Important for understanding the regulatory roles of miRNAs is the ability to predict the mRNA targets most responsive to each miRNA. Here, we acquired datasets needed for the quantitative study of microRNA targeting in Drosophila. Analyses of these data expanded the types of sites known to be effective in flies, expanded the mRNA regions with detectable targeting to include 5′ UTRs, and identified features of site context that correlate with targeting efficacy. Updated evolutionary analyses evaluated the probability of conserved targeting for each predicted site and indicated that more than a third of the Drosophila genes are preferentially conserved targets of miRNAs. Based on these results, a quantitative model was developed to predict targeting efficacy in insects. This model performed better than existing models and will drive the next version of TargetScanFly (v7.0; targetscan.org), thereby providing a valuable resource for placing miRNAs into gene-regulatory networks of this important experimental organism.