Assessment of the HEImiRA Pipeline: Analysis of circulating microRNAs in human plasma following an overnight fast

The HEImiRA pipeline annotates microRNAs (miRNAs) from small RNA sequencing data (sRNA-seq) in relation to the taxonomy of a given host and target organism. The pipeline was designed to quantify cross-kingdom miRNA transfer. To validate the pipeline, we utilized miRNA-Seq data prepared from plasma RNA samples obtained from eight healthy adult males. The plasma samples were collected from participants of a randomized, controlled, cross-over pilot clinical study after an overnight fasting period. These samples were considered as baseline plasma samples, as they were from the negative control (non-treatment) arm. Our findings indicate that HEImiRA can efficiently process miRNA-Seq data, map and quantify reads, and classify the miRNA species of origin.