Saturday 26 April 2014

miRCat - miRNA Categoriser

I am currently writing some lectures on RNA biology and came across the charmingly named miRCat: miRNA Categoriser.

This is a meta-acronym, with miRNA being short for microRNA (often abbreviated further to "miR" and pronounced “meer”, hence the logo) and RNA itself an acronym for Ribonucleic Acid).

miRCat is a tool to identify miRNAs in high-throughput small RNA sequence data… miRCat takes a FASTA file of small RNA reads as input and will map them to a reference genome… The tool then looks at genomic hit distribution patterns and secondary structure of genomic regions corresponding to sRNA hits and will predict miRNAs and their precursor structures.

Given the homophonic aspect of the acronym, I reckon this counts as pre hoc. As far as I am aware, “Categoriser” is not even a real (English) word, so this is definitely acronym contrivance worth of ORCA.

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