Inferring the perturbed microRNA regulatory networks from gene expression data using a network propagation based method

摘要

BackgroundMicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of endogenous small regulatory RNAs. Identifications of the dys-regulated or perturbed miRNAs and their key target genes are important for understanding the regulatory networks associated with the studied cellular processes. Several computational methods have been developed to infer the perturbed miRNA regulatory networks by integrating genome-wide gene expression data and sequence-based miRNA-target predictions. However, most of them only use the expression information of the miRNA direct targets, rarely considering the secondary effects of miRNA perturbation on the global gene regulatory networks.