Table 1.

Nomenclature guidelines for miRNAs. Reference [44] and www.mirbase.org

ANNOTATION	CRITERIA
First 3 lower case letters	Denotes species (i.e. hsa = human, rno = rat, dme = drosophila)
mir/miR	Lower case “r” indicates pri- or pre- forms. Upper case “R” indicates mature sequence
Number	Number is assigned based on date of sequence validation (i.e. lower numbers were discovered first)
Lower case letter after number	Denotes closely related sequences (i.e. miR-20a, miR-20b)
-3p/-5p	Indicates the arm of the precursor hairpin from which the mature sequence was derived.

Note – the ‘minor’ miRNA product (usually transcribed from the -3p end and expressed at lower concentrations in the cell) was previously designated with an asterisk (*). This annotation will no longer be recognized beginning with miRBase17 and will be replaced with the -3p/-5p annotation.