How to find miRNA precursor (or gene) for a specific miRNA - (Nov/30/2007 )

Hello,
I want to study the regulation of a miRNA. There is no reference about the gene coding this miRNA or about the precursor miRNA. Is there any strategy for finding miRNA precursor or noncoding miRNA genes computationally?
I found paper talking about genome wide miRNA precursor prediction. But is there any way to look for a specific one?
Thanks!

---

So you only know the mature form of the microRNA and thus it is a putative miRNA, not a verified one? In that case you need an intensive bioinformatics analysis of the genomic sequences to find out whether the miRNA sequence matches to a region that can form stem-loop structure and whether this region is conserved across species.

---

Thank you for your reply! It is known that the mature dsRNA is functional. I am also wondering whether there is any molecular way to clone the precursor RNA. If all the miRNA are transcribed by RNA polII and have poly A tail, can I take the total RNA, reverse transcribe it and try PCR using polyA primer and miRNA specific primer?

Thanks!

---