A potential role for intragenic miRNAs on their hosts interactome

摘要

BackgroundmiRNAs are small, non-coding RNA molecules that mainly act as negative regulators of target gene messages. Due to their regulatory functions, they have lately been implicated in several diseases, including malignancies. Roughly half of known miRNA genes are located within previously annotated protein-coding regions ("intragenic miRNAs"). Although a role of intragenic miRNAs as negative feedback regulators has been speculated, to the best of our knowledge there have been no conclusive large-scale studies investigating the relationship between intragenic miRNAs and host genes and their pathways.