MicroRNAs （miRNAs）, a class of ～20-24 nt long non-coding RNAs, have critical roles in diverse biological processes including devel- opment, proliferation, stress response, etc. With the development and availability of experimental technologies and computational approaches, the field of miRNA biology has advanced tremendously over the last decade. By sequence complementarity, miRNAs have been estimated to regulate certain mRNA transcripts. Although it was once thought to be simple and straightforward to find plant miR NA targets, this viewpoint is being challenged by genetic and biochemical studies. In this review, we summarize recent progress in plant miRNA target recognition mechanisms, principles of target prediction, and introduce current experimental and computational tools for plant miRNA target prediction. At the end, we also present our thinking on the outlook for future directions in the development of plant miRNA target finding methods.
In the past decades,advances in high-throughput technologies have led to the generation of huge amounts of biological data that require analysis and interpretation.Recently,nonnegative matrix factorization （NMF） has been introduced as an efficient way to reduce the complexity of data as well as to interpret them,and has been applied to various fields of biological research.In this paper,we present CloudNMF,a distributed open-source implementation of NMF on a MapReduce framework.Experimental evaluation demonstrated that CloudNMF is scalable and can be used to deal with huge amounts of data,which may enable various kinds of a high-throughput biological data analysis in the cloud.CloudNMF is freely accessible at http：//admis.fudan.edu.cn/projects/CloudNMF.html.
