
In silico model for miRNA-mediated regulatory network in cancer
Author(s) -
Khandakar Tanvir Ahmed,
Jiao Sun,
William Chen,
Irene Martínez,
ShuennRen Cheng,
Wencai Zhang,
Jeongsik Yong,
Wei Zhang
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
briefings in bioinformatics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.204
H-Index - 113
eISSN - 1477-4054
pISSN - 1467-5463
DOI - 10.1093/bib/bbab264
Subject(s) - in silico , microrna , computational biology , gene expression , biology , gene regulatory network , regulation of gene expression , interaction network , gene , proteomics , proteome , messenger rna , systems biology , bioinformatics , genetics
Deregulation of gene expression is associated with the pathogenesis of numerous human diseases including cancer. Current data analyses on gene expression are mostly focused on differential gene/transcript expression in big data-driven studies. However, a poor connection to the proteome changes is a widespread problem in current data analyses. This is partly due to the complexity of gene regulatory pathways at the post-transcriptional level. In this study, we overcome these limitations and introduce a graph-based learning model, PTNet, which simulates the microRNAs (miRNAs) that regulate gene expression post-transcriptionally in silico. Our model does not require large-scale proteomics studies to measure the protein expression and can successfully predict the protein levels by considering the miRNA-mRNA interaction network, the mRNA expression, and the miRNA expression. Large-scale experiments on simulations and real cancer high-throughput datasets using PTNet validated that (i) the miRNA-mediated interaction network affects the abundance of corresponding proteins and (ii) the predicted protein expression has a higher correlation with the proteomics data (ground-truth) than the mRNA expression data. The classification performance also shows that the predicted protein expression has an improved prediction power on cancer outcomes compared to the prediction done by the mRNA expression data only or considering both mRNA and miRNA. Availability: PTNet toolbox is available at http://github.com/CompbioLabUCF/PTNet.