Shedding light on microRNA function

The discovery of miRNAs has led to an extensive investigation on their biogenesis, function and regulation. The understanding of the exact role of miRNAs in cells, however, has been hampered by difficulties in the identification of functional miRNA targets. These difficulties are caused by the partial complementary way by which miRNAs bind their target sequences. Several computational methods have been devised that predict that miRNAs can potentially regulate hundreds of targets at the same time. However, the current prediction methods were already shown to predict many of false positive targets. In the study presented here, we aimed to overcome this problem and tried to identify biologically relevant miRNA targets in order to gain more insight in miRNA function. To this end, we designed a reporter-based screening method to identify miRNAs that can regulate 3’UTRs of genes of interest.