[BioC] miRNA and validated/predicted target genes

[Michal Okoniewski]

-----Original Message-----
From: bioconductor-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch on behalf of Wacek Kusnierczyk
Sent: Wed 6/17/2009 4:01 PM
To: mauede at alice.it
Cc: bioconductor at stat.math.ethz.ch
Subject: Re: [BioC] miRNA and validated/predicted target genes
 
mauede at alice.it wrote:
> I posted the following question to R mailing-list and was adviced to contact the BioConductors team.
>
> I have to find humans miRNA sequences and the correspondent validated and/or predicted gene sequences.
> The only database I know of is  http://mirecords.umn.edu/miRecords where all such information is accessed through a set of structured web site  pages.
> I wonder whether R or C++  provides an interface to automatically extract such data from miRecords or any other similar database.
>
> I would greatly appreciate any suggestion even about other databases from where it is possible to get the same sort of data and s/w packages that facilitate database access.
>
>   

alternatively to mirecords, you can download fasta-formatted human (and
other) mirs and targets from mirbase at sanger [1], and importing fasta
to r should be an easy task for you.  alternatively, there are database
dumps available. 

i don't know of an r/bioc package targetted specifically at a mirna
database;  it's possible that the data are not available for
programmatic access otherwise than through a bulk download (or html
parsing, if you prefer...)

vQ


[1] http://microrna.sanger.ac.uk

==================

I played with miRGen : http://www.diana.pcbi.upenn.edu/cgi-bin/miRGen/v3/Targets.cgi#Results (quite comprehensive, seems to include miranda and several other target databases)
and TargetScan: http://www.targetscan.org/

but as Wacek wrote - there's no biomaRt-like interface (at least I did not see...) but a lot of fun with html/flat file parsing instead :) 

Cheers, 
Michal