ANALYSIS OF REGULATORY MIRNA ON NUCLEAR ENCODED MITOCHONDRIAL PROTEINS

Abstract

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play a vital role in regulating gene expression by inhibiting protein coding genes by repressing mRNA translation or promoting their degradation. Since miRNAs are known as major players in several biological processes, they are being considered as key to better understand, explain, and probably cure not only the pathogenesis of multifactorial diseases but also mitochondrial dysfunction and associated diseases. Several essential cellular functions of mitochondria depend on a high degree of functional interaction between nuclear and mitochondrial genomes. Mitochondria, is known to be the master of an array of cellular processes, may be effected by the intervention of miRNAs. Thus, it becomes important to find out the suspected effects of miRNAs on mitochondrial function as well. The goal of this study is to find out if the nuclear encoded mitochondrial proteins are being targeted by miRNA, and thus affecting their functions. Therefore the list of mitochondrial proteins was retrieved from HMPDb and was manually curated. Also proteins which did not have crystal structures available were modeled using SWISS-MODEL and were filtered out on the basis of high core coverage percentage and sequence identity followed by function prediction from EBI PRoFunc server, which identified sequence motifs from various databases. The modeled structures were then energy minimized on GROMACS, were submitted for plotting Ramachandran plots and subsequently miRNA targets were predicted using mirDB and miRanda to identify the miRNAs that are involved highly in regulation of genes.