A microRNA-Gene Network in Ovarian Cancer from Genome-Wide QTL Analysis

摘要

Ovarian cancer is the most deadly reproductive cancer in women. A better understanding of the biological mechanisms of ovarian cancer is needed for earlier diagnosis and more effective treatment. Differential microRNA(miRNA) expression and miRNA/mRNA dysregulation have been associated with ovarian cancer. Whole-genome miRNA and mRNA sequencing provides a new prospective to study these aberrations for their associations with ovarian cancer. In this study, we perform a genome-wide QTL analysis between miRNA and gene expression in ovarian cancer, using data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). The results from such QTL analysis provided a network new of the relationship between miRNA and gene expression. We found that all of the identified miRNAs were reported previously to be associated with different diseases, and particularly, the majority of these miRNAs were shown to be associated with ovarian cancer. Our results replicated several cancer genes, and provided a list of candidate cancer genes as well. In summary, we showed that our integrative analysis would help understand the molecular mechanism of disease manifestation and progression, and eventually result in better prognosis, diagnosis and treatment of ovarian cancer.