MOLECULAR NETWORK ANALYSIS OF MICRORNA AND MRNA EXPRESSION PROFILES IN PANCREATIC CANCER

Abstract

Micro RNAs (miRNAs) are important gene regulators. They control wide range of biological pathways and involved in several type of diseases including cancers. Generally, a single miRNA simultaneously regulates hundreds of target mRNAs called as “targetome”, hence playing a key role in fine tuning of the diverse cellular functions, such as proliferation, differentiation, metabolism and apoptosis. The main aim of this study was to explore the underlying molecular mechanisms and potential target molecules of pancreatic adenocarcinoma. This analysis was done by determining differential gene expression in cancer using the open-source R programming environment in conjunction with the open-source Bioconductor software. The miRNA (GSE28955) expression profiles of patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma and healthy controls were downloaded from the Gene Expression Omnibus database. Gene expression profile of 4 tumor and 4 normal tissues by using aglient two colour GeneChip (microarray chip) was determined. Differentially expressed miRNA genes were identified by analyzing the microarray algorithm after data preprocessing. Functional analysis was conducted by the Database for Annotation, Visualization and Integrated Analysis. miRNA-mRNA regulation pairs were obtained in MirRecords database. The expression of 15 miRNA are found to differ significantly of which 9 genes are down-regulated and 6 genes are up-regulated, in tumor arrays. This differential expression of genes was found using two independent statistical methods. Our study screened out some miRNAs and their target mRNAs for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, which may be helpful in its diagnosis and treatment.