On the relationship between GC content and the number of predicted microRNA binding sites by MicroInspector

MicroRNA GC content and length is believed to play a role in the prediction of putative microRNA targets. MicroInspector was evaluated to determine the extent to which these characteristics of microRNAs play a role in binding site predictive accuracy. A strong bias towards under predicting the number of expected bindings sites for low GC content sequences was observed, especially for microRNAs with <50% GC content. Researchers working with organisms with unusually low GC content should be aware of this bias.