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A new method to study the change of miRNAmRNA interactions due to environmental exposures.

Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery

Integrative approaches characterizing the interactions among different types of biological molecules have been demonstrated to be useful for revealing informative biological mechanisms. One such example is the interaction between microRNA (miRNA) and messenger RNA (mRNA), whose deregulation may be sensitive to environmental insult leading to altered phenotypes. In this work, we introduce a new network approachâ integrative Joint Random Forest (iJRF), which characterizes the regulatory system between miRNAs and mRNAs using a network model. iJRF is designed to work under the high-dimension low-sample-size regime, and can borrow information across different treatment conditions to achieve more accurate network inference. It also effectively takes into account prior information of miRNAâ mRNA regulatory relationships from existing databases. We then apply iJRF to data from an animal experiment designed to investigate the effect of low-dose environmental chemical exposure on normal mammary gland development. We detected a few important miRNAs that regulated a large number of mRNAs in the control group but not in the exposed groups, suggesting the disruption of miRNA activity due to chemical exposure. Effects of chemical exposure on two affected miRNAs were further validated using breast cancer human cell lines.

Mathematics; Statistics; Computer science

video/mp4

Author affiliation: Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

2019-05-06

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/70066

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/