P-TarPMir: A Web server for accurate plant-specific miRNA target prediction

Most miRNA target predictors have focused on animal species and prediction performance drops substantially when applied to plant species. Several rule-based miRNA target predictors have been developed in plant species, but they often fail to discover new miRNA targets with non-canonical miRNA-mRNA binding.

Here, the recently published TarDB database of plant miRNA-mRNA data is leveraged to retrain the TarPMir miRNA target predictor for application on plant species. Rigorous experiment design across four plant test species demonstrates that animal-trained predictors fail to sustain performance on plant species, and that the use of plant-specific training data improves accuracy depending on the quantity of plant training data used.