meta-miRNA is a tool for allowing microRNA meta analysis. Users can download public dataset [i.e. from ncbi, The Sequence Read Archive (SRA), http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sra] directly processable in the tool or provide their own data. Once the sequences are extracted from the .sra archive they are made compatibale to work in Qiime, then the following steps occur:

1. Performing a closed-reference miRNAs picking against a modified version of the Human Ensemble non-coding RNA database (ftp://ftp.ensembl.org/pub/release-73/fasta/homo_sapiens/ncrna/) without the miRNAs annotation.

2. Filtering from the original sequences file all the sequences that did not hit the Human Ensemble non-coding RNA database.

3. Performing another closed-reference miRNAs picking with the filtered sequences form step 2. against the miRBASE mature miRNAs databse (http://www.mirbase.org/ftp.shtml)

4. Making a miRNA table from step 3.

5. Computing principal coordinate analysis with Bray Curtis

Note:

This tool is untested and you should NOT use this version until this message will be removed and tests are added