ViTa: a database of host microRNA targets on viruses

Abstract

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are involved in various biological processes by suppressing gene expression. Recent work has indicated that host-miRNAs also regulate viral gene expression by targeting to virus genomes. To investigate the regulatory relationships between the host-miRNAs and related viruses, we present a novel database, namely ViTa, to curate the known virus miRNA genes and the known/putative target sites of human, mice, rat and chicken miRNAs. Known miRNAs are obtained from miRBase. Virus data is collected from ICTVdB, VBRC and VirGen. Experimentally validated miRNA targets on viruses were extracted from literatures. Then, miRanda and TargetScan are utilized to computationally predict the miRNA targets within virus genomes. ViTa also provides the virus annotations, virus infected tissue preferences and tissue-specificity of host-miRNAs. This work also facilitates the comparisons between subtypes of viruses, such as influenza viruses, human liver viruses and the conserved regions between viruses. Both textual and graphical web interfaces are provided to facilitate the data retrieves in ViTa database. The database is now freely available at http://vita.mbc.nctu.edu.tw/.