The distance distribution of human microRNAs in MirGeneDB database.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small single-stranded non-coding RNAs around 22 nucleotide lengths found in organisms, playing an important role in cell differentiation, development, gene regulation, and apoptosis. The distance of disease miRNA biomarkers has been used to explore the association between various diseases as well as the association between virus and disease in the literature. To date, there have been no studies on deriving the distribution of the pairwise distance of human miRNAs. As the pairwise distance of miRNA biomarkers might be a useful tool in studying the disease association, in this paper, the distance distributions of human miRNAs were derived such that they could be used to measure the closeness between miRNAs. Two distance models were used to calculate the pairwise distances of 567 Homo sapiens miRNA genes accessed from the MirGeneDB database. These miRNA pairwise distances were fitted by the normal distribution, gamma distribution, empirical cumulative distribution, and the kernel density estimation method. This is the first study to provide the distance distribution of human miRNAs. The similarity of miRNA biomarkers for several diseases was examined using the derived distributions.