Authors:
Gianfranco Politano
1
;
Alfredo Benso
2
;
Stefano Di Carlo
1
;
Francesca Orso
3
;
Alessandro Savino
2
and
Daniela Taverna
3
Affiliations:
1
Politecnico di Torino, Italy
;
2
Politecnico di Torino and Consorzio Interuniversitario Nazionale per l'Informatica, Italy
;
3
Molecular Biotechnology Center (MBC) and Università di Torino, Italy
Keyword(s):
microRNA, miR-214, Melanomas, Biological Pathways, Gene Regulation, Post-transcriptional Regulation.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Bioinformatics
;
Biomedical Engineering
;
Data Mining and Machine Learning
;
Genomics and Proteomics
;
Systems Biology
;
Transcriptomics
Abstract:
In the complex world of post-transcriptional regulation, miR-214 is known to control in vitro tumor cell movement
and survival to anoikis, as well as in vivo malignant cell extravasation from blood vessels and lung
metastasis formation. miR-214 has also been found to be highly expressed in human melanomas, and to
directly and indirectly regulate several genes involved in tumor progression and in the establishment of distant
metastases (Penna et al., 2011). In this work, we exploit a computational pipeline integrating data from
multiple online data repositories to identify the presence of transcriptional or post-transcriptional regulatory
modules involving miR-214 and a set of 73 previously identified miR-214 regulated genes. We identified 27
putative regulatory modules involving miR-214, NFKB1, SREBPF2, miR-33a and 9 out of the 73 miR-214
modulated genes (ALCAM, POSTN, TFAP2A, ADAM9, NCAM1, SEMA3A, PVRL2, JAG1, EGFR1). As a preliminary
experimental validation we focused on 9 out of t
he 27 identified regulatory modules that involve two
main players, miR-33a and SREBF2. The results confirm the importance of the predictions obtained with the
presented computational approach.
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