A system biology approach for understanding the miRNA regulatory network in colon rectal cancer.

In this paper we present a systems biology approach to the understanding of the miRNA-regulatory network in colon rectal cancer. An initial set of significant genes in Colon Rectal Cancer (CRC) were obtained by mining relevant literature. An initial set of cancer-related miRNAs were obtained from three databases: miRBase, miRWalk, Targetscan and GEO microarray experiment. First principle methods were then used to generate the global miRNA-gene network. Significant miRNAs and associated transcription factors in the global miRNA-gene network were identified using topological and sub-graph analyses. Eleven novel miRNAs were identified and three of the novel miRNAs, hsa-miR-630, hsa-miR-100 and hsa-miR-99a, were further analysed to elucidate their role in CRC. The proposed methodology effectively made use of literature data and was able to show novel, significant miRNA-transcription associations in CRC.