Extended rat miRNA repertoire

Generally, Rattus norvegicus' miRNA repertoire falls short compared to the other rodent model organism, Mus musculus.

To extend the miRNA catalogue in Rattus norvegicus, we utilized Infernal v1.1 (Nawrocki and Eddy, 2013) to derive potential rat miRNA candidates starting from all available mammalian miRNA families in miRBase. We utilized MIRfix (Yazbeck et al., 2019) to curate the extended miRNA datasets automatically. Subsequent manual inspection and curation of miRNA alignments resulted in a reliable and comprehensive update to the rat miRNA annotation.

Key facts of the extended miRNA repertoire

• 342 miRNA families (40 novel families)
• 549 miRNA sequences (56 novel miRNAs)
•  11 corrected annotated miRNAs

European Nucleotide Archive

The 56 novel sequences not listed in miRBase before have been submitted to the European Nucleotide Archive at EMBL-EBI.
They are accessible with the accession numbers OZ078105 - OZ078160.
The sequences will be permanently available from the ENA browser at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/data/view/<ACCESSION NUMBERS>.

An overview of all sequences is given here: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/data/view/OZ078105-OZ078160.