A predicted miR-27a-mediated network identifies a signature of glioma.

The dysregulation of physiological microRNA (miRNA) activity has been shown to play an important role in gliomagenesis. In a previous study, using microRNA arrays and glioma tissues found that miR-27a was upregulated, which was also identified in the glioma cell lines and samples by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). In this study, in order to explore the potential roles of miR-27a in the progression of glioma, we first utilized text-mining of PubMed abstracts with natural language processing (NLP) to identify 1,168 glioma-related molecules. In addition, miR-27a targets predicted by computational methods were integrated with the results from NLP analysis, followed by Gene Ontology (GO), pathway and network analysis. We identified 33 hub genes by overlap calculation and demonstrated that miR-27a may be involved in the progression of glioma through adherens junction, focal adhesion, the neurotrophin signaling pathway, the MAPK signaling pathway, the transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) signaling pathway, cytokine-cytokine receptor interactions, the p53 signaling pathway, the apoptotic signaling pathway, as well as others. Our data may provide researchers with a better understanding of the mechanisms of the miR-27a-target network in glioma initiation and progression.