"In order to further validate whether these candidates are bona fide miRNAs, we examined their expression level in mutants of
alg-1(
gk214), which is necessary for miRNA maturation (Grishok et al. 2001). We found that five of the candidate miRNAs examined significantly reduced their accumulation in the
alg-1(
gk214) mutant background, indicating that they are real miRNAs (Fig. 8D, top)... However, for two candidates, 405191_adh and 1263561_spe, we could not validate these as real miRNAs since they did not show reduced expression in the
alg-1(
gk214) or
alg-2(
ok304) mutants (Fig. 8D)."