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

Asiedu Ebenezer

. 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 It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the .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 7 required for effective siRNA-mediated gene silencing, including mammalian genes [22] . High scoring siRNA candidates therefore exhibit enough nucleotide-based features required for effective gene silencing. As shown in Table 2 , four siRNA candidates scored at least 75%. The ideal length of siRNA for effective gene silencing is still a subject of controversy in the design of siRNA. The dicer-mediated processing of dsRNAs results in short sequences (19) (20) (21) (22) (23) of siRNA with 2 nucleotide overhangs. Longer siRNA sequences (25) (26) (27) have also been reported to be functional because the dicer will process such sequences [29] . The GC content of an siRNA duplex is a parameter that can define the gene silencing efficacy of siRNAs. A moderate occurrence of GC in the siRNA (≈32%-≈58%) is preferential [24] . GC content of the high scoring siRNAs ranged from 34% to 58% (Table 2) . A high GC% delays unwinding of siRNA duplex by nuclear helicases whereas a low GC% slows hybridization of siRNA to target mRNA [24] .