Homology-based approach to extend the miRNA repertoire in Rattus norvegicus. Extended miRNA repertoire in Rattus norvegicus

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. In total, we identified 55 new miRNA sequences and 40 previously unknown miRNA families in rat.