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a catalog of worldwide biological databases

microRNAs (miRNAs) are active in various biological processes by mediating gene expression, and the full investigation of miRNA transcription is crucial for understanding the mechanisms underlying miRNA deregulation in pathological conditions. Here an updated TransmiR v3.0 database is presented with more comprehensive miRNA transcription regulation information, which contains 5095 transcription factor (TF) -miRNA regulations curated from 2285 papers and >6 million TF-miRNA regulations derived from ChIP-seq data. Currently, TransmiR v3.0 covers 3260 TFs, 4253 miRNAs and 514 433 TF-miRNA regulation pairs across 29 organisms. Additionally, motif scanning of TF loci on promoter sequences of miRNAs from multiple species is employed to predict TF-miRNA regulations, generating 284 527 predicted TF-miRNA regulations. Besides the significant growth of data volume, we also improve the annotations for TFs and miRNAs by introducing the TF family, TFBS motif, and expression profiles for several species. Moreover, the functionality of the TransmiR v3.0 online database is enhanced, including allowing batch search for flexible queries and offering more extensive disease-specific, as well as newly sex-specific TF-miRNA regulation networks in the 'Network' module. TransmiR v3.0 provides a useful resource for studying miRNA biogenesis regulation and can be freely accessed at http://www.cuilab.cn/transmir.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are important post-transcriptional regulators of gene expression and play vital roles in various biological processes. It has been reported that aberrant regulation of miRNAs was associated with the development and progression of various diseases, but the underlying mechanisms are not fully deciphered. Here, we described our updated TransmiR v2.0 database for more comprehensive information about transcription factor (TF)-miRNA regulations. 3730 TF-miRNA regulations among 19 species from 1349 reports were manually curated by surveying >8000 publications, and more than 1.7 million tissue-specific TF-miRNA regulations were further incorporated based on ChIP-seq data. Besides, we constructed a 'Predict' module to query the predicted TF-miRNA regulations in human based on binding motifs of TFs. To facilitate the community, we provided a 'Network' module to visualize TF-miRNA regulations for each TF and miRNA, or for a specific disease. An 'Enrichment analysis' module was also included to predict TFs that are likely to regulate a miRNA list of interest. In conclusion, with improved data coverage and webserver functionalities, TransmiR v2.0 would be a useful resource for investigating the regulation of miRNAs. TransmiR v2.0 is freely accessible at http://www.cuilab.cn/transmir.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) regulate gene expression at the posttranscriptional level and are therefore important cellular components. As is true for protein-coding genes, the transcription of miRNAs is regulated by transcription factors (TFs), an important class of gene regulators that act at the transcriptional level. The correct regulation of miRNAs by TFs is critical, and increasing evidence indicates that aberrant regulation of miRNAs by TFs can cause phenotypic variations and diseases. Therefore, a TF-miRNA regulation database would be helpful for understanding the mechanisms by which TFs regulate miRNAs and understanding their contribution to diseases. In this study, we manually surveyed approximately 5000 reports in the literature and identified 243 TF-miRNA regulatory relationships, which were supported experimentally from 86 publications. We used these data to build a TF-miRNA regulatory database (TransmiR, http://cmbi.bjmu.edu.cn/transmir), which contains 82 TFs and 100 miRNAs with 243 regulatory pairs between TFs and miRNAs. In addition, we included references to the published literature (PubMed ID) information about the organism in which the relationship was found, whether the TFs and miRNAs are involved with tumors, miRNA function annotation and miRNA-associated disease annotation. TransmiR provides a user-friendly interface by which interested parties can easily retrieve TF-miRNA regulatory pairs by searching for either a miRNA or a TF.