Section: New Results

Host-symbiont genetic dialog

Two sets of problems were addressed: (i) the development of algorithms for analysing NGS data especially RNAseq, and (ii) the development of algorithms for identifying small RNAs, notably microRNAs, and their targets.

The computational work on NGS is described in another section.

Computational work on small RNAs, initially miRNAs, led to the development of a new algorithmic method. This builds upon previously developed approaches, one which was applied to Anopheles darlingi for inferring miRNAs that however had a high rate of false positives, and a second that provided a way for navigating among all the candidates found. Recently however, we arrived at a better model for such inference in the double sense that the rate of false positives is smaller without losing in sensitivity, while the method is much faster. The paper presenting this work and the algorithm (Mirinho ) was submitted and is currently in revision.