No. Tool Species Method in brief Availability
1 MiRanda
Enright et al.
, John et
al. [68,75,76]
Drosophila,
Vertebrates
Evolutionary conservation, binding energy, weighted score using base pairs, gap penalties http://www.microrna.org/microrna/getDownloads.do
(Stand-alone application)
2 TargetScan
Lewis et al. [74]
Vertebrates Seed match, Match outside seed region, Conservation of seed region http://genes.mit.edu/tscan/targetscanS.html (Web application)
3 RNAhybrid
Rehmsmeier [18]
Drosophila Negative normalized minimum free energy values based on length of target sequence and length of mi-
croRNA, shows statistical significance of predicted targets
http://bibiserv.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/rnahybrid/dl_pre-page.html (Stand-alone application)
4 DIANA-microT
Kirikidou et al. [77]
Human, Mouse Search restricted 3' UTR of mRNAs, Minimum energy of potential sequence (38 nt) in comparison with 100 complementary sequence, filtering based on microRNA associated proteins http://diana.cslab.ece.ntua.gr/microT/(Web application, can
download the software on request)
5 TargetScanS
Lewis et al. [17]
Vertebrates Simple version of TargetScan, perfect seed match, scoring based on dynamic programming http://genes.mit.edu/tscan/targetscanS2005.html
(Web application)
6 PicTar Kerk et al. [70,73] Drosophila,
Vertebrates
Search limited to conservative 3' UTR regions, scoring by HMM and multiple sequence alignment with eight vertebrate species http://pictar.mdc-berlin.de/
(Web application)
7 RNA22
Huynh et al. [78],
Phillipe L et al. [79]
C.elegans,
Human,
Drosophila,
Mouse
Initial identi_cation of putative sites by pattern match (with-out knowing targeting microRNAs), then associate microRNA with target(user defined parameters- minimum number of base pairs, maximum number of unpaired bases, maximum allowed free energy) http://cbcsrv.watson.ibm.com/rna22.html
(Web application)
8 MicroTar
Rahul and Mortti [80]
C.elegans,
Drosophila,
mouse
No evolutionary conservation constraint, seed match and free energy(RNAlib) are deciding parameters http://tiger.dbs.nus.edu.sg/microtar/
(Stand-alone application)
9 NBmiRTar
Yousef et al. [81]
human, mouse,
y, worm, ze-
bra_sh
Do not require sequence conservation, based on seed match and outside features of microRNA:mRNA
duplex, and Naive Bayes classifier
http://wotan.wistar.upenn.edu/NBmiRTar/
(Web application)
10 PiTA Kertesz et
al. [82]
Human,Mouse,y
C.elegans,
Secondary structure, Seed region with single mismatch or G:U wobble, Free energy of miRNA:mRNA structure http://genie.weizmann.ac.il/pubs/mir07/mir07_data.html
(Stand-alone application)
11 targetRank
Cydney et al. [83]
Human, mouse Conservation, Sequence alignment with 16 vertebrate genome, Seed match http://genes.mit.edu/targetrank/
(Web application)
12 miRDB Xiaowei [84,85] Human,
mouse, rat,
dog, chicken
Target prediction by the tool MirTarget2 http://mirdb.org/miRDB/index.html
(Web application)
13 MiRtif
Yuchen et al. [86]
Worm, Mouse,
Human, Fly
Support vector machine microRNA:mRNA interaction filter. predicted microRNA interactions
from miRanda, PicTar, and TargetScanS are further filtered using SVM
http://bsal.ym.edu.tw/mirtif
(Web application)
14 MTar
Chandra et al. [71]
Human Structural, positional, thermodynamic properties and machine learning with ANN http://www.mca.cet.ac.in/research.htm
(Stand-alone application)
15 targetSpy
Martin et al. [87]
Human,mouse,
rat, chicken,y
Evolutionary conservation and perfect seed match are not a criteria, based on ranked structural, base
pairing properties (45 parameters) with machine learning
http://www.targetspy.org/ (Web application)
16 psRNATarget
Xinbin Dai et
al.  [88]
Plant Reverse complementary matching score between microRNA and mRNA, unpaired energy required
to open secondary structure of mRNA
http://plantgrn.noble.org/psRNATarget
(Web application)
17 MiRTar Hsu et al. [89] Human microRNA target are determined using TargetScan, miRanda, PITA, and RNAHybrid. Also find extend of biological function of microRNA by estimating over
expression in KEGG pathways
http://mirtar.mbc.nctu.edu.tw/human/
(Web application)
18 comiR Claudia
Coronnello et al. [90]
Human Single probabilistic score calculated from microRNA target score from four popular target finding tools,PITA, miRanda, TargetScan and mirSVR http://www.benoslab.pitt.edu/comir/index2.php (Web
application)
19 HomoTarget
Hamed Ahmadi et al. [88]
Human Pattern recognition neural network (PRNN) based classifier. Initial sequence alignment, then seed match
based filtering, followed by PRNN
http://lbb.ut.ac.ir/Download/LBBsoft/homoTarget/ (Stand-
alone application)
20 starBase
V2.0 Jun-
Hao Li et al. [91]
Human microRNA targets are identified using prediction overlap from five tools, TargetScan, miRanda,
Pictar2, PITA and RNA22, while finding ceRNA interactions
http://starbase.sysu.edu.cn/targetSite.php
(Web application)
Table 2 lists microRNA target prediction software tools in the order of development and publication year. The table shows a brief description of method used, the type of availability (whether through web interface or to download and install locally), and species related.
Table 2: Available microRNA target prediction Tools.