miRNA Temporal Analyzer (mirnaTA)

The microRNA Temporal Analyzer (mirnaTA) is a bioinformatics tool which can be used to identify differentially expressed miRNAs in temporal studies. It is implemented in Perl and R package (>= 2.13.0) and can be run across multiple platforms such as Linux, Mac and Windows. The mirnaTA requires that users provide data from a minimum of two time points and analyze up to 20 time points. To normalize data and remove technical variability, Normal Quantile Transformation (NQT) was used, and the normalized data is analyzed using linear regression model to locate any miRNAs which are differentially expressed in a linear manner. Any miRNAs with P-value<0.05 are considered statistically significant. Remaining miRNAs which did not fit in linear model are further analyzed in two different methods: (1) if the number of time points <3, CDF of the normal distribution, and (2) if the number of time points is >= 3, ANOVA is utilized.
http://www.gigasciencejournal.com/content/3/1/20