Abstract
Recent studies suggest that mRNAs may be differentially expressed between males and females. This study aimed to perform expression analysis of mRNA and its main regulatory molecule, microRNA (miRNA), to discuss the potential sex-specific expression patterns using abnormal expression profiles from The Cancer Genome Atlas database. Generally, deregulated miRNAs and mRNAs had consistent expression between males and females, but some miRNAs may be oppositely expressed in specific diseases: up-regulated in one group and down-regulated in another. Studies of miRNA gene families and clusters further confirmed that these sequence or location related miRNAs might have opposing expression between sexes. The specific miRNA might have greater expression divergence across different groups, suggesting flexible expression across different individuals, especially in tumor samples. The typical analysis regardless of the sex will ignore or balance these sex-specific deregulated miRNAs. Compared with flexible miRNAs, their targets of mRNAs showed relative stable expression between males and females. These relevant results provide new insights into miRNA-mRNA interaction and sex difference.
Highlights
To understand sex differences and miRNA and mRNA expression, their interactions, we selected specific and shared diseases in males and females to assess differences in miRNA and mRNA expression using public sequencing datasets, and selection of sex-specific diseases contributed to simultaneously understand miRNA and mRNA expression via comparison of shared diseases
Compared to rare collected miRNAs, more mRNAs were obtained in each group, including 89 shared mRNAs in the four groups (Figure S1B)
The results shown here were in whole based upon data generated by The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) Research Network: http://cancergenome.nih.gov/
Summary
This study aimed to perform expression analysis of mRNA and its main regulatory molecule, microRNA, to discuss the potential sex-specific expression patterns using abnormal expression profiles from The Cancer Genome Atlas database
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