Specificity of predicted miRNA-mRNA targeting associations.

For the set of mRNAs differentially expressed miRNAs in ES cells that satisfied the criteria of Class 1A, 1B and 3 we asked the question, is there a non-random number of predicted targets? All conserved and non-conserved target sites for each of the genes indicated in the table were downloaded from TargetScan. Scaling by the corresponding variance estimate, we derived Z-scores for each gene for targeting enrichment. Enrichment scores of >2 are significant. Of the large number of predicted interaction between miRNAs in Class 1A, 1B and 3 we find that only a fraction exhibits enrichment scores of >2 and therefore are highly specific. We conclude that these miRNA-mRNA pairs are the most important in the regulation of ES cell self-renewal and pluripotence.