Antibody-based methods such as CLIP can detect direct interactions between microRNAs and their mRNA targets in cell populations with nucleotide resolution. However, these methods typically require millions of cells, and cannot be applied to study the single cells where the interactions occur.
Today, sequencing of DNA from ancient samples is a standard method in Paleogenomics, however, RNA is generally unstable due to the ubiquitous presence of RNases in the environment.
