Computational analysis of microRNA-mediated antiviral defense in humans

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.