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PHACT-miRBind project produces new evolutionary scores for human microRNAs

The BioGeMT team at the Centre for Molecular Medicine & Biobanking at the University of Malta, together with collaborators at Sabancı University in Türkiye, has reached a new milestone in the PHACT-miRBind project through the production of evolutionary tolerance scores for human microRNAs.

MicroRNAs are small molecules that help regulate gene expression and are involved in many important biological processes. Changes within their sequences can influence how they function, making it valuable to understand which positions have remained conserved throughout evolution.

PHACT, which stands for Phylogeny-Aware Computing of Tolerance, uses information from related sequences across different species to study these evolutionary patterns. By comparing orthologous microRNAs using a consensus phylogenetic tree, researchers can estimate how tolerant individual positions may be to nucleotide changes.

The newly produced resource covers 331 human precursor microRNAs and provides position-by-position evolutionary information. It will allow researchers to explore which regions appear to be strongly conserved and which show greater evolutionary tolerance.

This milestone follows the preparation of the project’s first dataset and represents another important step in assembling the resources required for PHACT-miRBind. The current work focuses on producing and organising the evolutionary scores. Their integration into computational approaches for microRNA target prediction will take place during the project’s next stages.

The work combines the University of Malta’s expertise in microRNA biology and data science with Sabancı University’s expertise in phylogenetic and evolutionary analysis.

PHACT-miRBind is led at ½ñÈÕºÚÁÏ by Prof. Panagiotis Alexiou, while the Sabancı University team is headed by . The project is funded by Xjenza Malta and TÜBÄ°TAK.