Introduction

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) have been found in many organisms and play essential roles in gene expression regulation of many critical cellular processes, including human cancers. There are many databases provide excellent information and resource for the miRNA genes and their predicted mRNA targets, including miRbase. While these miRNA databases are useful for biologists to access basic static information about miRNAs, we believe that a more user-friendly and interactive web tool is beneficial for biomedical researchers to freely interrogate the miRNA expression information and their potential target genes. We have now established a web interface for users to query the miRNA expression information using TCGA (The Cancer Genome Atlas) dataset. The D3 javascript toolbox is highly utilized to provide the easy to use interactive user interface. miR-TV is a database that contains miRNAs, miRNA targets data and their expression data from TCGA resource. miRNA target prediction data come from miRDB, targetScan and miRanda algorithm results. Only the intersected data included in miR-TV database. Since many biologists would like to ask particular biological questions critical in their research fields, we would like to provide more freedom to explore the miRNA and target gene expression information in this miR-TV database. Therefore, miR-TV not only provide basic simple statistical result, we greatly emphasize on the customization tools for data interrogation. Users will be able to change the way miRNA expression data displayed and interactively investigate the target mRNA gene expression and clinical information according to their own criteria. We believe that such a data visualization bioinformatic tool is an excellent demonstration for large biological big-data in the future. Please refer to the quick user guide for the usage of miR-TV.