REST and Huntington disease: Packer et al. (2008) predicted target sites for miR-9 in the 3′-UTR of REST mRNA. Moreover, miR-9∗ possesses a predicted site in the 3′-UTR of CoREST. In postmortem HD brain samples, bifunctional brain-enriched miR-9/9∗ was also validated, which targets the REST-CoREST complex. A subsequent study on the importance of miR-9∗ derived from peripheral leukocytes of patients with HD found that miR-9∗ expression levels were significantly lower in these patients and the downregulation may be a signature of neurodegeneration (Chang et al., 2017).