Identifying transcriptional miRNA biomarkers by integrating high-throughput sequencing and real-time PCR data

► Reproducible analysis workflow for miRNA expression by high-throughput sequencing. ► How to address the challenges raised by mapping short miRNA reads. ► Special treatment for dinucleotide color space mapping. ► Biomarker candidate discovery by robust normalization and differential expression analysis. ► Validation with RT-qPCR Cq-values.