Affinity purification of binding miRNAs for messenger RNA fused with a common tag.

Prediction of microRNA-mRNA interaction typically relies on bioinformatic methods, but these methods only suggest the possibility of microRNA binding and may miss important interactions as well as falsely predict others. A major obstacle to the miRNA research has been the lack of experimental procedures for the identification of miRNA-mRNA interactions. Recently, a few studies have attempted to explore experimental methods to isolate and identify miRNA targets or miRNAs targeting a single gene. Here, we developed an more convenient experimental approach for the isolation and identification of miRNAs targeting a single gene by applying short biotinylated DNA anti-sense oligonucleotides mix to enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) mRNA which was fused to target gene mRNA. This method does not require a design of different anti-sense oligonucleotides to any mRNA. This is a simple and an efficient method to potentially identify miRNAs targeting specific gene mRNA combined with chip screen.