During this period, we started to construct the PmiRDB. Much effort was made by the whole team, including:

1) Collect and design all elements about our database. For instance, Zhonglong Guo designed the logo of PmiRDB which is a book with a cartoon leaf and stem-loop miRNA as the following.

Another example is Dr. Yang suggested to employ hand-drawing pictures as the icons of all plants. Zheng Kuang collected most hand-drawing pictures from http://www.plantgenera.org/. The following are three examples (tomato, strawberry and papaya).

All key publications, tools, resources were collected and displayed on resource page.

2) Implement all functions of the PmiRDB. Technically, much effort was made to fulfill the function of search engines (we have 9 search engines, one is the engine on home page which could search all data in database, and 8 search engines on search page including deploying BLAST search engine, miRNA target search engines, etc.), download functions, and so on.

3) Considering our database surpasses a classic miRNA database as it includes almost all available information on plant miRNAs, which makes it a knowledgebase. Thus, we change PmiRDB to PmiREN (Plant miRNA ENcyclopedia), and we registered the domain www.PmiREN.com for this miRNA knowledgebase.

Through 4-5 months, the prototype of PmiREN was developed. Its logic was like the flowchart below.