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MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of small RNAs, evolutionarily conserved endogenous non-coding RNAs that regulate their target mRNA expression by either inactivating or degrading mRNA genes; thus playing an important role in the growth and development of an organism. Maruca vitrata is an insect pest of leguminous plants like pigeon pea, cowpea and mung bean and is pantropical. In this study, we perform BLAST on all known miRNAs against the transcriptome data of M. vitrata and thirteen miRNAs were identified. These miRNAs were characterised and their target genes were identified using TargetScan and were functionally annotated using FlyBase. The importance of the structure of pre-miRNA in the Drosha activity led to study the backbone torsion angles of predicted pre-miRNAs (mvi-miR-9751, mvi-miR-649-3p, mvi-miR-4057 and mvi-miR-1271) to identify various nucleotide triplets that contribute to the variation of torsion angle values at various structural motifs of a pre-miRNA.

Community databases have become crucial to the collection, ordering and retrieval of data gathered on model organisms, as well as to the ways in which these data are interpreted and used across a range of research contexts. This paper analyses the impact of community databases on research practices in model organism biology by focusing on the history and current use of four community databases: FlyBase, Mouse Genome Informatics, WormBase and The Arabidopsis Information Resource. We discuss the standards used by the curators of these databases for what counts as reliable evidence, acceptable terminology, appropriate experimental set-ups and adequate materials (e.g., specimens). On the one hand, these choices are informed by the collaborative research ethos characterising most model organism communities. On the other hand, the deployment of these standards in databases reinforces this ethos and gives it concrete and precise instantiations by shaping the skills, practices, values and background knowledge required of the database users. We conclude that the increasing reliance on community databases as vehicles to circulate data is having a major impact on how researchers conduct and communicate their research, which affects how they understand the biology of model organisms and its relation to the biology of other species.