Discovery of functional miRNA-mRNA regulatory modules with computational methods
- Publication date
- Publisher
- Elsevier
Abstract
The identification of miRNAs and their target mRNAs and the construction of their regulatory networks may give new insights into biological procedures. This study proposes a computational method to discover the functional miRNA–mRNA regulatory modules (FMRMs), that is, groups of miRNAs and their target mRNAs that are believed to participate cooperatively in post-transcriptional gene regulation under specific conditions. The proposed method identifies negatively regulated patterns of miRNAs and mRNAs which associate with cancer and normal conditions, respectively, in a prostate cancer data set. GO and the literature also suggest that they may relate with prostate cancer. It can potentially identify the biologically relevant chains of ‘miRNA → target gene → condition’.