A Deep Learning Model for MicroRNA-Target Binding

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are non-coding RNAs of ~21–23 bases length, which play critical role in gene expression. They bind the target mRNAs in the post-transcriptional level and cause translational inhibition or mRNA cleavage. Quick and effective detection of the binding sites of miRNAs is a major problem in bioinformatics. This chapter introduces a new technique to model microRNA-target binding using Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) over a miRNA-target duplex sequence representation.