Abstract
Prostate cancer is a highly prevalent disease in older men of the western world. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small RNA molecules that regulate gene expression via posttranscriptional inhibition of protein synthesis. To identify the diagnostic potential of miRNAs in prostate cancer, we downloaded the miRNA expression profile of prostate cancer from the GEO database and analysed the differentially expressed miRNAs (DE-miRNAs) in prostate cancerous tissue compared to non-cancerous tissue. Then, the targets of these DE-miRNAs were extracted from the database and mapped to the STRING and KEGG databases for network construction and pathway enrichment analysis. We identified a total of 16 miRNAs that showed a significant differential expression in cancer samples. A total of 9 target genes corresponding to 3 DE-miRNAs were obtained. After network and pathway enrichment analysis, we finally demonstrated that miR-20 appears to play an important role in the regulation of prostate cancer onset. MiR-20 as single biomarker or in combination could be useful in the diagnosis of prostate cancer. We anticipate our study could provide the groundwork for further experiments.
Highlights
Prostate cancer is a highly prevalent disease in older men of the western world (Chan et al, 2004; Linton and Hamdy, 2004)
After network and pathway enrichment analysis, we demonstrated that miR-20 appears to play an important role in the regulation of prostate cancer onset
After network analysis and pathway enrichment analysis, we demonstrated that miR-20 may play an important role in the regulation of prostate cancer onset
Summary
Prostate cancer is a highly prevalent disease in older men of the western world (Chan et al, 2004; Linton and Hamdy, 2004). MicroRNAs (miRNAs) were discovered in1993 by Victor Ambros et al during a study of the gene lin-14 in C. elegans development (Lee et al, 1993) They are short, non-coding RNAs with an average of 22 nucleotides in length that usually bind to partially complementary sites in the 3’-untranslated region (UTR) of their mRNA targets (Lee et al, 1993; Wightman et al, 1993). They regulate gene expression by mRNA cleavage and at posttranslational level by translational suppression and play important roles in various biological and metabolic processes (Bartel, 2004; Min and Yoon, 2010). A total of 940 mature miRNAs have been identified in human genome according to the miRBase (Kozomara and Griffiths-Jones, 2011)
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