Author
Listed:
- Yun Xiao
- Chaohan Xu
- Jinxia Guan
- Yanyan Ping
- Huihui Fan
- Yiqun Li
- Hongying Zhao
- Xia Li
Abstract
MicroRNAs, a new class of key regulators of gene expression, have been shown to be involved in diverse biological processes and linked to many human diseases. To elucidate miRNA function from a global perspective, we constructed a conserved miRNA co-expression network by integrating multiple human and mouse miRNA expression data. We found that these conserved co-expressed miRNA pairs tend to reside in close genomic proximity, belong to common families, share common transcription factors, and regulate common biological processes by targeting common components of those processes based on miRNA targets and miRNA knockout/transfection expression data, suggesting their strong functional associations. We also identified several co-expressed miRNA sub-networks. Our analysis reveals that many miRNAs in the same sub-network are associated with the same diseases. By mapping known disease miRNAs to the network, we identified three cancer-related miRNA sub-networks. Functional analyses based on targets and miRNA knockout/transfection data consistently show that these sub-networks are significantly involved in cancer-related biological processes, such as apoptosis and cell cycle. Our results imply that multiple co-expressed miRNAs can cooperatively regulate a given biological process by targeting common components of that process, and the pathogenesis of disease may be associated with the abnormality of multiple functionally cooperative miRNAs rather than individual miRNAs. In addition, many of these co-expression relationships provide strong evidence for the involvement of new miRNAs in important biological processes, such as apoptosis, differentiation and cell cycle, indicating their potential disease links.
Suggested Citation
Yun Xiao & Chaohan Xu & Jinxia Guan & Yanyan Ping & Huihui Fan & Yiqun Li & Hongying Zhao & Xia Li, 2012.
"Discovering Dysfunction of Multiple MicroRNAs Cooperation in Disease by a Conserved MicroRNA Co-Expression Network,"
PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 7(2), pages 1-11, February.
Handle:
RePEc:plo:pone00:0032201
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0032201
Download full text from publisher
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0032201. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.