TargetScanHuman

TargetScanHuman predicts conserved microRNA (miRNA) binding sites in human mRNA 3' untranslated regions (3' UTRs) to identify potential miRNA–mRNA interactions for studying post-transcriptional gene regulation.

Key Features:

• Species Selection: Provides prediction data and comparative conservation across species including human, mouse, rat, chimpanzee, rhesus monkey, cow, dog, opossum, chicken, and frog.
• Gene Query: Accepts human gene symbols (e.g., "Hmga2") to retrieve target predictions for specific transcripts.
• Conserved Site Prediction: Identifies conserved 8mer, 7mer, and 6mer sites complementary to miRNA seed regions within 3' UTRs to predict miRNA–mRNA interactions.

Scientific Applications:

• Interaction Network Construction: Used to build lncRNA–miRNA and miRNA–mRNA interaction networks for analysis of regulatory relationships.
• Cancer Research and Case Example: Applied in oncology studies, for example predicting interactions among ZFAS1, miR-892b, and LPAR1 in nasopharyngeal carcinoma to support hypotheses of ZFAS1 sponging miR-892b and up-regulating LPAR1.

Methodology:

Interaction networks were constructed using the miRcode v11 and TargetScanHuman v7.2 web servers.