Ana María Aransay, researcher of CIC bioGUNE

A team of researchers from the Functional Genomics Unit at CIC bioGUNE, led by Ana María Aransay, has developed a bioinformatics tool that enables researchers to analyse and interpret the results of the sequencing of microRNAs or small non-codifying RNAs, molecules of ribonucleic acid transcribed from DNA sequences that are not translated into proteins. It is a free-access web tool called ‘miRanalyzer’, and it has had a great impact since it was published in May in the journal Nucleic Acids Research.

MicroRNAs (also called miRNAs) are small molecules (between 19 and 25 nucleotids) of ribonucleic acid (RNA) transcribed from specific areas of DNA, which are not translated into proteins, and which up until now were thought to have regulatory functions. MiRNAs appear in a wide variety of organisms, from plants to worms to human beings. Many miRNAs are well conserved over their period of evolution, which shows that their origin is very old. Some counts have identified up to 800 different miRNAs in humans, which means that all the miRNAs together might make up around 3% of the human genome.

The study of miRNAs is extremely useful for starting to understand certain cellular events that up until now could not be explained, such as the regulation of the expression of certain genes in cancerous cells or the modulation of the innate immune response. It is also very useful to have a description of the content of miRNAs in the different organs of the human body, to see whether they play any part in individual responses to certain drug treatments.

Up to now, researchers without the support of bioinformatics groups depended on third parties to analyse mass sequencing data of miRNAs. Now, with the publication of ‘miRanalyzer’, it is possible to carry out this analysis from any lab remotely and for free. As Ana María Aransay says, “the instructions for use of this web tool are very easy, and so is the preparation of the data files that are to be analysed, so it is very user-friendly for those of us who are not specialists in bioinformatics”.