**5. Experimentally validated siRNA datasets**

The effectiveness of the siRNA designing rules should be tested on biologically validated siRNA datasets. On the early days of RNAi research, these biologically validated datasets were scarce. But now, with emerging high throughput technologies, large amount of validated siRNA data is being generated. Some databases are created by manual curation of literature describing validation of siRNA mediated silencing. siRecords [12] is one such database where siRNAs are marked with their respective silencing efficacy (low, medium, high and very high). MIT siRNA database [14] consists of siRNAs designed by Qiagen with validated knockdown efficiency and marked with mRNA knockdown level.
