Who is responsible for miRBase?
miRBase is managed by researchers at University of Manchester and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute:
- Sam Griffiths-Jones founded the resource while he worked in Alex Bateman's group at the Sanger Institute. He now has a fellowship position in the Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Manchester. Sam remains responsible for miRNA nomenclature, sequence curation, and for all miRBase data.
- Ana Kozomara is a postdoc in Sam's group, funded by the BBSRC, and is responsible for all current development!
- Anton Enright is the author of the miRanda target prediction software, and manages the miRBase::Targets pipeline. Anton is a Group Leader at the EBI.
- Stijn van Dongen is a postdoc in Anton's group. Stijn does pretty much all the work of running the target prediction pipeline.
- Harpreet Kaur Saini is a postdoc supervised by Anton and Sam and funded by a GSK post-doctoral fellowship. She developed the interface to look at genomic feature annotation around miRNAs, in search of the boundaries of primary miRNA transcripts.
Other people have been involved at various times and at various levels:
- Mhairi Marshall and John Tate have provided significant input and time for web design.
- Jennifer Daub works with Sam on the Rfam database, and has also looked at ways to curate miRNA expression data.
- Russell Grocock is an ex-Enright group postdoc who worked on the first versions of miRBase::Targets.
- Sean Eddy, David Bartel, Tom Tuschl and Victor Ambros were all involved in ideas and support at the conception of miRBase, and continue to provide advice and feedback.
Queries about nomenclature, and questions and feedback about any miRBase::Sequences data should be directed to mirbase@manchester.ac.uk. Questions about target prediction and the miRBase::Targets database should go to microrna-targets@sanger.ac.uk.