Autophagy is a cellular survival pathway that is necessary for the degradation 
of cellular constituents such as long-lived proteins and damaged organelles. 
Conditions resulting in cellular stress such as starvation or hypoxia might 
activate autophagy. Being at the crossroads of various cellular response 
pathways, dysregulation of autophagy might result in pathological states 
including cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. Autophagy has also been shown 
to participate in stemness. MicroRNAs were introduced as novel regulators of 
autophagy, and accumulating results underlined the fact that they constituted an 
important layer of biological control mechanism on the autophagic 
activity.MicroRNAs are protein noncoding small RNAs that control cellular levels 
of transcripts and proteins through posttrancriptional mechanisms. Novel miRNAs 
in human and mouse genomes are yet to be identified. Considering the emerging 
role of autophagy in health and disease, identification of novel 
autophagy-regulating miRNAs and determination of relations between miRNA 
expression and physiological and pathological conditions might contribute to a 
better understanding of mechanisms governing health and disease. High-throughput 
techniques were developed for miRNA profiling, yet for a thorough 
characterization and miRNA target determination, miRNA cloning remains as an 
important step. Here, we describe a modified miRNA cloning method for the 
characterization of novel autophagy-regulating miRNAs.