[BioC] CORNA and biomaRt packages. miRNA and mRNA expression comparation

[Jordi Altirriba]

Dear Bioconductor users,
I am trying to work with CORNA.1.2. package to observe how miRNA regulates mRNA expression levels, as described in Wu X, Watson M, CORNA: testing gene lists for regulation by microRNAs, Bioinformatics. 2009 Mar 15;25(6):832-3.
I have downloaded this package from the authors’ webpage: http://corna.sourceforge.net/
Nevertheless, this package was compiled with a version previous than R.2.10.0, so I am not able to run it in R.2.12.0 version (current version).
I have downloaded R.2.9.0 version and I am able to load CORNA package but biomaRt is not running (BioMart web service failed) [sessionInfo below].
It’s not a problem of BioMart web service, as in R.2.12.0 BioMart is running correctly.
My questions:
1.- Is there any way to run BioMart in previous versions of R? (R.2.9.0 or previous)
2.- If it’s not possible, could I recompile CORNA package to run in R.2.12.0? How?
3.- Is there any other package to associate miRNA expression levels from microarrays with mRNA expression levels from other microarrays? (I am working with rats and mice and MMIA is not working with these species)
Many thanks for your time and suggestions.
Yours faithfully,

Jordi Altirriba
Laboratoire du Métabolisme
Centre Médical Universitaire
Geneve
 
> sessionInfo()
R version 2.9.0 (2009-04-17) 
i386-pc-mingw32 
locale:
LC_COLLATE=French_Switzerland.1252;LC_CTYPE=French_Switzerland.1252;LC_MONETARY=French_Switzerland.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=French_Switzerland.1252
attached base packages:
[1] tools     stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     
other attached packages:
[1] CORNA_1.2      XML_2.5-1      GEOquery_2.8.0 RCurl_0.98-1   bitops_1.0-4.1 biomaRt_2.0.0  Biobase_2.4.1