It appears that this is not a bioinformatics question therefore it is not appropriate to BioStar.

Btw.: Could it at all be obvious to a first-time visitor that this site is not dedicated to _Bio_logy but _Bio_informatics? I guess there is no easy way to tell

actually, it is bioinformatics partially. The reason is I would like to know the direction of the sequence when I analyze the 454 sequences afterwards. If I don't use specific adaptors in the preparation step, is there any other way to know the direction of the microRNA?

Sounds reasonable to me that you want a strand specific method. Are you already bound to 454? Maybe ask here: http://seqanswers.com/ They might know all the details.

Btw, wasn't this question borderline bioinformatics, and thus worth being kept open? We shouldn't be too restrictive with closing borderline bio (informatics) questions, only close spam and real off-topic or troll stuff.

I quess questions should be phrased in a way that it makes them obvious that they are bioinformatics related.

Ok well the question has been open for two months, with no answers, and it is offtopic still I feel, so if it's ok with everyone I'm going to close it as such. Seqanswers is a better forum for this.

Stackexchange site could be Majorgroove