miRNA & mutational robustness

Borenstein E & Ruppin E 2006 Direct evolution of genetic robustness in microRNA. PNAS 103:6593-6598.

• the structure of miRNA precursor stem loops exhibits significantly increased mutational robustness in comparison with a sample of random RNA sequences with the same stem-loop structure
• uncorrelated with traditional measures of environmental robustness - implying that miRNA sequences show evidence of the direct evolution of genetic robustness