MiRQuest: An Interactive App for MiRNA Sequencing Analysis

MiRQuest is an RShiny application for the analysis of microRNA-sequencing data. MicroRNA (miRNA) are small noncoding RNA that repress translation or induce degradation of target messenger RNA (mRNA). The app features common visualization methods for high-throughput sequencing data, such as multidimensional scaling, stacked column charts, heatmaps, and boxplots to compare expression across groups for a user-specified miRNA of interest. MiRQuest further provides support for differential miRNA and gene expression analysis. Unique to miRNome sequencing data analysis, users may retrieve predicted gene targets of differentially expressed miRNA and follow up with pathway overrepresentation analysis of the gene targets. Finally, if users upload paired bulk mRNA sequencing data, they may identify differentially expressed genes and further retrieve negatively correlated miRNA-gene pairs.