Figure 4

Relation between the mature microRNA's GC content and the number of predicted targets. The correlation of the GC content and the number of predicted targets was exemplified for predicted human targets of the Dlk1/Gtl2 microRNAs and the reference set that passed the conservation filter. The horizontal axis with the number of target genes is on logarithmic scale. Shown are the results for all three different target site filter strategies, Classic, Vari and 3000, with their corresponding Spearman's rank correlation coefficients. The Classic filter uses the same cutoff values for all microRNAs, the Vari filter uses cutoff values relative to a maximum score for each specific microRNA sequence and the 3000 filter only keeps the best 3000 predicted target sequences (see Additional file 5).