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Updated: Jul 11, 2026

MicroRNA-based Regulation of Picornavirus Tropism
Published on: February 6, 2017
Computational analysis of microRNA-mediated antiviral defense in humans
Yuka Watanabe1, Atsuko Kishi, Nozomu Yachie
1Institute for Advanced Biosciences, Keio University, Tsuruoka 997-0017, Japan.
Abstract:
Recent studies have proposed the interesting perspective that viral gene expression is downregulated by host microRNAs (miRNAs), small non-coding RNAs well known as post-transcriptional gene regulators. We computationally predicted human miRNA target sites within 228 human-infecting and 348 invertebrate-infecting virus genomes, and we observed that human-infecting viruses were more likely than invertebrate-infecting ones to be targeted by human miRNAs. We listed 62 possible human miRNA-targeted viruses from 6 families, most of which consisted of single-stranded RNA viruses. These results suggest that miRNAs extensively mediate antiviral defenses in humans.
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