Computational analysis and predictive modeling of small molecule modulators of microRNA

We generated computational models based on Naïve Bayes and Random Forest towards mining small RNA binding molecules from large molecular datasets. We complement this with substructure based approach to identify and understand potentially enriched substructures in the active dataset. We use this approach to identify miRNA binding potential of a set of approved drugs, suggesting a probable novel mechanism of off-target activity of these drugs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first and most comprehensive computational analysis towards understanding RNA binding activities of small molecules and predictive modeling of these activities.