Analyzing microRNA Epistasis in Colon Cancer Using Empirical Bayesian Elastic Nets

摘要

Recent studies have shown that colon cancer progression involves epigenetic changes of small non-coding microRNAs (miRNAs). It is unclear how multiple miRNAs induce phenotypic changes via epistasis, even though epistasis is an important component in cancer research. We used an Empirical Bayesian Elastic Net to analyze both the main, and epistatic effects of miRNA on the pathological stage of colon cancer. We found that most of the epistatic miRNAs shared common target genes, and found evidence for colon cancer associations. Our pipeline offers a new opportunity to explore epistatic interactions among genetic and epigenetic factors associated with pathological stages of diseases.