Designing Effective small interfering RNA for Post-Transcriptional Silencing of Human GREM1: A Comprehensive Bioinformatics Approach

Asiedu Ebenezer

Major issues in siRNA-based therapy have to do with delivery, efficacy, off-target effects, toxicity and immunostimulatory effects [19] . Careful selection and design of potential therapeutic siRNA can alleviate some of the major challenges especially off-target effects. The success of siRNA knockdown depends on several factors that must be considered during siRNA design. The intrinsic characteristics of the siRNA is of prime importance to knockdown efficiency since minor changes in siRNA sequence could affect the functionality [20] . In view of . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.23.917559 doi: bioRxiv preprint 3 this, properties such as nucleotide content, sequence length and duplex thermodynamics should be considered during siRNA design. The target binding site is also a subject of evaluation in terms of its location and accessibility [16] .