A knowledge base for the discovery of function, diagnostic potential and drug effects on cellular and extracellular miRNAs

BMC Genomics

Research

Rosalba Giugno¹  Sebastiano Di Bella¹  Alfredo Ferro¹  Alfredo Pulvirenti¹  Vincenzo Bonnici²  Alessandro Laganà³  Giuseppe Rainaldi⁴  Marco Pellegrini⁴  Francesco Russo⁵ 

[1] Department of Clinical and Molecular Biomedicine, University of Catania, Italy;Department of Computer Science, University of Verona, Italy;Department of Molecular Virology, Immunology and Medical Genetics Comprehensive Cancer Center, The Ohio State University, OH, USA;Laboratory of Integrative System Medicine, Institute of Informatics and Telematics and Institute of Clinical Physiology, National Research Council, Pisa, Italy;Laboratory of Integrative System Medicine, Institute of Informatics and Telematics and Institute of Clinical Physiology, National Research Council, Pisa, Italy;Department of Clinical and Molecular Biomedicine, University of Catania, Italy;

关键词: miRNA Expression;    miRNA Expression Profile;    Extracellular Form;    Extracellular miRNAs;    Exosomal miRNAs;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2164-15-S3-S4

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundMicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small noncoding RNAs that play an important role in the regulation of various biological processes through their interaction with cellular mRNAs. A significant amount of miRNAs has been found in extracellular human body fluids (e.g. plasma and serum) and some circulating miRNAs in the blood have been successfully revealed as biomarkers for diseases including cardiovascular diseases and cancer. Released miRNAs do not necessarily reflect the abundance of miRNAs in the cell of origin. It is claimed that release of miRNAs from cells into blood and ductal fluids is selective and that the selection of released miRNAs may correlate with malignancy. Moreover, miRNAs play a significant role in pharmacogenomics by down-regulating genes that are important for drug function. In particular, the use of drugs should be taken into consideration while analyzing plasma miRNA levels as drug treatment. This may impair their employment as biomarkers.DescriptionWe enriched our manually curated extracellular/circulating microRNAs database, miRandola, by providing (i) a systematic comparison of expression profiles of cellular and extracellular miRNAs, (ii) a miRNA targets enrichment analysis procedure, (iii) information on drugs and their effect on miRNA expression, obtained by applying a natural language processing algorithm to abstracts obtained from PubMed.ConclusionsThis allows users to improve the knowledge about the function, diagnostic potential, and the drug effects on cellular and circulating miRNAs.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Russo et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.