Takane et al. BMC Genomics 2010, 11:101 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/11/101 Page 4 of 13 Figure 1 Computational extraction of conserved miRNA/target gene pairs among bilaterian animals. Evolutionarily conserved miRNAs were extracted from the five model species (H. sapiens, M. musculus, G. gallus, D. melanogaster, and C. elegans). For each miRNA, potential target genes were predicted using the following criteria: optimal free-energy threshold and complete matching of nucleotide sequences between the seed sequence of miRNA/mRNA duplexes (step 1), binding pattern of the 3’-UTR of miRNA/mRNA duplexes (step 2), and orthologous gene information (step 3).