Bioinformatics, non-coding RNAs and its possible application in personalized medicine

Non-coding RNAs are important actors in human biology. A massive amount of data has been created and manipulated, and important findings have been extracted thanks in part to bioinformatics approaches and consequent experimental validation; many of these results are for a specific class of non-coding RNAs, the microRNAs (miRNAs), that are important regulators of gene expression although their transcriptional regulation is not yet well understood. Their involvement in cancer development and progression makes the related research field an integrated one, composed of bioinformaticians, clinicians, statisticians and biologists, as well as informaticians and data miners that cure data manipulation and storage especially due to the output of the latest technologies, like the Next Generation Sequencers. In this chapter we report the main miRNA findings of the last 10 years in terms of identification and prediction techniques, data generation and manipulation methods, as well as possible use in clinical practice.