A New Network-Based Strategy for Predicting the Potential miRNA-mRNA Interactions in Tumorigenesis

摘要

MicroRNA (miRNA) plays an important role in the degradation and inhibition of mRNAs and is a kind of essential drugtargets for cancer therapy. To facilitate the clinical cancer research, we proposed a network-based strategy to identify thecancer-related miRNAs and to predict their targeted genes based on the gene expression profiles. The strategy wasvalidated by using the data sets of acute myeloid leukemia (AML), breast invasive carcinoma (BRCA), and kidney renalclear cell carcinoma (KIRC). The results showed that in the top 20 miRNAs ranked by their degrees, 90.0% (18/20),70.0% (14/20), and 70.0% (14/20) miRNAs were found to be associated with the cancers for AML, BRCA, and KIRC,respectively. The KEGG pathways and GO terms enriched with the genes that were predicted as the targets of thecancer-related miRNAs were significantly associated with the biological processes of cancers. In addition, several genes,which were predicted to be regulated by more than three miRNAs, were identified to be the potential drug targetsannotated by using the human protein atlas database. Our results demonstrated that the proposed strategy can behelpful for predicting the miRNA-mRNA interactions in tumorigenesis and identifying the cancer-related miRNAs as thepotential drug targets.