title: Evaluating the consistency of differential expression of microRNA detected in human cancers.
abstract: Differential expression of microRNA (miRNA) is involved in many human diseases and could potentially be used as a biomarker for disease diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy. However, inconsistency has often been found among differentially expressed miRNAs identified in various studies when using miRNA arrays for a particular disease such as a cancer. Before broadly applying miRNA arrays in a clinical setting, it is critical to evaluate inconsistent discoveries in a rational way. Thus, using data sets from 2 types of cancers, our study shows that the differentially expressed miRNAs detected from multiple experiments for each cancer exhibit stable regulation direction. This result also indicates that miRNA arrays could be used to reliably capture the signals of the regulation direction of differentially expressed miRNAs in cancer. We then assumed that 2 differentially expressed miRNAs with the same regulation direction in a particular cancer play similar functional roles if they regulate the same set of cancer-associated genes. On the basis of this hypothesis, we proposed a score to assess the functional consistency between differentially expressed miRNAs separately extracted from multiple studies for a particular cancer. We showed although lists of differentially expressed miRNAs identified from different studies for each cancer were highly variable, they were rather consistent at the level of function. Thus, the detection of differentially expressed miRNAs in various experiments for a certain disease tends to be functionally reproducible and capture functionally related differential expression of miRNAs in the disease.
authors.affiliation: College of Bioinformatics Science and Technology, Harbin Medical University, Harbin 150086, China.
authors.forename: Xue
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Gong
authors.forename: Ruihong
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.forename: Hongwei
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Xinwu
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Guo
authors.forename: Dong
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Yunyan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Gu
authors.forename: Yuannv
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Wenyuan
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.forename: Lixin
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Cheng
authors.forename: Chenguang
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Zheng
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Guo
mesh_terms: D019295:Computational Biology; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling; D015972:Gene Expression Regulation, Neoplastic; D006801:Humans; D035683:MicroRNAs / Q000235:genetics / Q000378:metabolism*; D008954:Models, Biological; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000503:physiopathology*
chemical_list: D035683:MicroRNAs