CORNA: testing gene lists for regulation by microRNAs

Motivation: With the increasing use of post-genomics techniques to examine a wide variety of biological systems in laboratories throughout the world, scientists are often presented with lists of genes that they must make sense of. A consistently challenging problem is that of de. ning co-regulated genes within those gene lists. In recent years, microRNAs have emerged as a mechanism for regulating several cellular processes. In this article, we report on how gene lists and microRNA targets data may be integrated to test for significant associations between gene lists and microRNAs. Results: We discuss CORNA, a package written in R and released under the GNU GPL, which allows users to test gene lists for significant microRNA-target associations using one of three separate statistical tests, to link microRNA targets to functional annotation and to visualize quantitative data associated with those data.