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Due to natural variation, sequencing errors, and processing issues, variation between reference sequence and sample sequence is always possible. Alignment to the human genome allows a putative "microRNA" read the opportunity to find a better alignment in a region of the genome that is not an annotated microRNA relative to the microRNA reference sequence. If this occurs, we might think that a read represents a microRNA (since it aligned in the mirbase alignment), when it is actually more likely to have come from a non-miRNA area of the genome.