Interestingly, we observed that 717 miRNAs targeting SARS-CoV-2 genes are common with those targeting SARS-CoV genes, possibly due to high genome similarity (Xu et al., 2020; Zhang and Holmes, 2020, p. 2) (Supplementary Table S7).
From our rigorous analysis pipeline, which covers three different well-established algorithms (IntaRNA, miRanda, and psRNATarget) to predict RNA-RNA interactions, we have identified 122 and 106 host antiviral miRNAs against SARS-CoV (R) and SARS-CoV-2 (R), respectively (Figures 2A,B, Supplementary File 2).