OncomiRDB: a database for the experimentally verified oncogenic and tumor-suppressive microRNAs

MicroRNAs (miRNAs), a class of small regulatory RNAs, play important roles in cancer initiation, progression and therapy. MiRNAs are found to regulate diverse cancer-related processes by targeting a large set of oncogenic and tumor-suppressive genes. To establish a high-confidence reference resource for studying the miRNA-regulated target genes and cellular processes in cancer, we manually curated 2259 entries of cancer-related miRNA regulations with direct experimental evidence from ∼9000 abstracts, covering more than 300 miRNAs and 829 target genes across 25 cancer tissues. A web-based portal named oncomiRDB, which provides both graphical and text-based interfaces, was developed for easily browsing and searching all the annotations. It should be a useful resource for both the computational analysis and experimental study on miRNA regulatory networks and functions in cancer.