Abstract
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are endogenous 21–23 nucleotide molecules that are known to regulate about 30% of protein-coding genes through the RNAi pathway. Low level expression of some miRNA has limited their in-situ discovery. Such limitations could be ameliorated by in-silico methodologies. The efficacies of three major programs (ERPIN, ProMir and miR-abela) in detecting known pre-miRNA were evaluated using chicken pre-miRNA data. The sensitivity of ProMir, miR-abela and ERPIN were 53%, 57% and 93%, respectively. The specificity of the three algorithms using 5,000 random sequences was 98.94%, 99.46%, and 99.10% for ProMir-g, ERPIN and miR-abela, respectively. The sensitivities of the existing programs are low for chicken data and an efficient algorithm may be needed to predict novel chicken pre-miRNAs.