MicroRNA Targetomes

The discovery of microRNAs (miRNAs) and their regulation of mRNAs uncovered a genome-wide mechanism of gene regulation.

It initiated intense efforts to identify the mRNA targets of miRNAs, which have been partly successful for many miRNAs using sequence-based prediction tools. However, miRNAs often have non-canonical functions, and to help identify these we developed an RNA chemistry (external page Angew Chem 2013) to capture by cross-linking all mRNA binding partners of a miRNA in cells (external page Nat Chem Biol 2015).

Indeed, this approach revealed new roles of some miRNAs, including an exciting interplay between two families of tumor suppressor and oncogenic miRNAs.

We continue developing chemistry and biology of miR-CLIP since there is still no good experimental method to identify miRNA "targetomes" and the technology may be of value in characterizing novel interactions of other non-coding RNAs.