miRACA: A database for miRNAs associated with cancers and age related disorders (ARD)

Abstract

BACKGROUND: With the given diversity and abundance of several targets of miRNAs, they functionally appear to interact with several elements of the multiple cellular networks to maintain physiologic homeostasis. They can function as tumor suppressors or oncogenes, whose under or overexpression has both diagnostic and prognostic significance in various cancers while being implicated as prospective regulators of age-related disorders (ARD) as well. Establishing a concatenate between ARD and cancers by looking into the insights of the shared miRNAs may have a practical relevance.

METHODS: In the present work, we performed network analysis of miRNA-disease association and miRNA-target gene interaction to prioritize miRNAs that play significant roles in the manifestation of cancer as well as ARD. Also, we developed a repository that stores miRNAs common to both ARD and cancers along with their target genes.

RESULTS: We have comprehensively curated all miRNAs that we found to be shared in both the diseases in the human genome and established a database, miRACA (Database for microRNAs Associated with Cancers and ARD) that currently houses information of 1648 miRNAs that are significantly associated with 38 variants supported with pertinent data. It has been made available online at http://genomeinformatics.dtu.ac.in/miraca/ for easy retrieval and utilization of data by the scientific community.

CONCLUSION: To the best of our knowledge, our database is the first attempt at compilation of such data. We believe this work may serve as a significant resource and facilitate the analysis of miRNA regulatory mechanisms shared between cancers and ARD to apprehend disease etiology.

Keywords

miRNA / cancer / age related disorders (ARD) / target genes / database

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Abbreviations

ARD: Age related disorders; CCKR: Cholecystokinin receptor; dbAARD database of Aging and Age Related Disorders; DAVID: The Database for Annotation, Visualization and Integrated Discovery; GO: Gene Ontology; HMDD: the Human microRNA Disease Database; miRACA: Database for microRNAs Associated with Cancers and ARD; PANTHER: Protein Analysis Through Evolutionary Relationships

Compliance with ethics guidelines

RaziaRahman and YashaHasija declare that they have no conflict of interest. This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

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