Probing miRNAs with microarrays: tissue specificity and functional inference

We describe a method to detect miRNAs using microarrays, in which the miRNAs are directly hybridized to the array. We used this method to analyze miRNA expression across 16 mouse organs and tissues. More than half of the 78 miRNAs detected were expressed in specific adult tissues. By comparing miRNA levels to mRNA levels determined in a parallel microarray analysis of the same tissues, we found that the expression of target mRNAs predicted on the basis of sequence similarity is biased towards the tissues in which the corresponding miRNA is expressed. The remainder of the data comprises of absolute expression levels of a comprehensive survey of other mouse noncoding RNA. The expression levels were measured using multiple independent probes that were tiled across each transcript. Keywords: other