The point of this experiment was to identify miRs in the spiny lobster nervous system. The cerebral, thoracic and abdominal ganglia were removed from one animal and flash frozen in liquid nitrogen. RNA was isolated using a mirVana kit. The sample was sent to LC Sciences for deep sequencing with an Illumina platform. Unmappable sequences were removed from raw reads, and sequences ranging from 15-32 bases in length were analyzed further. Identical sequences were clustered and unique reads were mapped to various databases. Reads that mapped to mRNA, RFam and RepBase were not analyzed further. Reads that mapped to miRBase and hairpin structures in arthropod genomes were assumed to be true miRs and were included here. Other small RNAs that did not map to miRBase and mapped to genomic sequences that did not have the propensity to form hairpins, or were not found in any database, were not included here. Unique sequences representing putative lobster miRs were designated pint-mirs. The pint-mirs were further grouped into families based on known homology. For example, 3 unique sequences mapping to ame-mir-2-3, nvi-mir-2b and dpu-mir-2-1 in miRBase were all grouped into the mir-2 family. Unique members of the same family were indicated by a lower case letter(s), e.g., pint-mir-2-a, pint-mir-2-b, etc. Lower case letters do not imply orthology. The six putative pint-miRs with no known homology were named according to their read IDs. In the majority of cases, pint-mirs have not been experimentally validated and so are referred to as putative mirs.

The number of reads in each category is:

The putative miRs for this experiment can be visualized here. The number of reads for a given pint-mir is as indicated. This experiment has been deposited in xx and the accession number is xx. It is associated with the following publications...