We examined whether MDV-1-miR-M4 and gga-miR-155 shared a common set of target genes by use of a recently developed miRNA target prediction algorithm, MirTarget2 (32, 33). Several of the predicted targets of MDV-1-miR-M4 (see Table S1 in the supplemental material) were common to those already identified as gga-miR-155 targets (http://mirdb.org/cgi-bin/search.cgi).
As may be observed, we detected significant and selective repression of FLuc expression mediated by these 3'UTRs that was partially or entirely alleviated by mutation of the predicted miR-M4/miR-155 target sites.