title: miRiadne: a web tool for consistent integration of miRNA nomenclature.
abstract: The miRBase is the official miRNA repository which keeps the annotation updated on newly discovered miRNAs: it is also used as a reference for the design of miRNA profiling platforms. Nomenclature ambiguities generated by loosely updated platforms and design errors lead to incompatibilities among platforms, even from the same vendor. Published miRNA lists are thus generated with different profiling platforms that refer to diverse and not updated annotations. This greatly compromises searches, comparisons and analyses that rely on miRNA names only without taking into account the mature sequences, which is particularly critic when such analyses are carried over automatically. In this paper we introduce miRiadne, a web tool to harmonize miRNA nomenclature, which takes into account the original miRBase versions from 10 up to 21, and annotations of 40 common profiling platforms from nine brands that we manually curated. miRiadne uses the miRNA mature sequence to link miRBase versions and/or platforms to prevent nomenclature ambiguities. miRiadne was designed to simplify and support biologists and bioinformaticians in re-annotating their own miRNA lists and/or data sets. As Ariadne helped Theseus in escaping the mythological maze, miRiadne will help the miRNA researcher in escaping the nomenclature maze. miRiadne is freely accessible from the URL http://www.miriadne.org.
authors.affiliation: Istituto Nazionale Genetica Molecolare 'Romeo ed Enrica Invernizzi', Via F. Sforza 35, 20122 Milan, Italy bonnal@ingm.org.
authors.forename: Raoul J P
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2123-6536
authors.initials: RJ
authors.lastname: Bonnal
authors.affiliation: Istituto Nazionale Genetica Molecolare 'Romeo ed Enrica Invernizzi', Via F. Sforza 35, 20122 Milan, Italy bonnal@ingm.org.
authors.forename: Riccardo L
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4964-3264
authors.initials: RL
authors.lastname: Rossi
authors.affiliation: Istituto Nazionale Genetica Molecolare 'Romeo ed Enrica Invernizzi', Via F. Sforza 35, 20122 Milan, Italy.
authors.forename: Donatella
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Carpi
authors.affiliation: Istituto Nazionale Genetica Molecolare 'Romeo ed Enrica Invernizzi', Via F. Sforza 35, 20122 Milan, Italy.
authors.forename: Valeria
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Ranzani
authors.affiliation: Istituto Nazionale Genetica Molecolare 'Romeo ed Enrica Invernizzi', Via F. Sforza 35, 20122 Milan, Italy.
authors.forename: Sergio
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Abrignani
authors.affiliation: Istituto Nazionale Genetica Molecolare 'Romeo ed Enrica Invernizzi', Via F. Sforza 35, 20122 Milan, Italy Department of Medical Biotechnology and Translational Medicine, Università degli Studi di Milano, Via Festa del Perdono 7, 20122 Milano, Italy bonnal@ingm.org.
authors.forename: Massimiliano
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Pagani
mesh_terms: D020407:Internet; D035683:MicroRNAs / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000378:metabolism; D058977:Molecular Sequence Annotation; D012984:Software; D009626:Terminology as Topic
chemical_list: D035683:MicroRNAs