In the past few years, we have observed a significant increase of experimental miRNA–mRNA interaction data in the PolymiRTS database, and we expect this trend to continue in the future. The original version of the PolymiRTS (19) database (launched in 2006) included only SNPs in predicted miRNA target sites, as few experimentally identified miRNA target site were available. Since then, rapid advances in high-throughput technologies for detecting miRNA–mRNA interaction, such as PAR-CLIP (24) and HITS-CLIP (23), have made it increasingly important to include experimental miRNA binding data in the PolymiRTS database (20). However, while these experiments identify the locations of the binding sites, they still depend on computational algorithms to predict the binding miRNAs. Recently, a large number of miRNA target sites have been identified by the CLASH experiments (26), which is the first high-throughput technology that allows direct observation of miRNA–target pairs without the assistance of computational target prediction or scanning. CLASH data also includes a large number of noncanonical miRNA–mRNA interactions that cannot be easily identified by previous methods (26). Thus, the integration of CLASH data in the
