Title: Gene regulation in glioblastoma: a combinatorial analysis of microRNAs and transcription factors

Authors: Xue Gong, Jingchun Sun, Zhongming Zhao

Addresses: Department of Biomedical Informatics, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee 37232, USA. ' Departments of Biomedical Informatics and Psychiatry, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee 37232, USA. ' Departments of Biomedical Informatics, Psychiatry, and Cancer Biology, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee 37232, USA

Abstract: Glioblastoma is the most common and most lethal brain tumour in humans. Illustrating the functions being disturbed during carcinogenesis and how they are deregulated is very important for us to understand its underlying mechanism. Transcriptional aberrations may play a vital role in the etiology of glioblastoma, which might be caused by both genomic alterations and other regulation molecules. In this study, we investigated possible cooperative deregulation of microRNAs (miRNAs) and transcription factors (TFs) in glioblastoma, under the hypothesis that miRNAs and TFs might have a combinational regulatory effect on glioblastoma genes. We searched glioblastoma-specific regulatory networks by integrating glioblastoma related miRNAs, TFs and genes, and identified 54 feed-forward loops (FFLs). Follow up functional enrichment analysis of these FFLs uncovered some functions important to carcinogenesis but also some unique functions specific to the FFLs we identified.

Keywords: systems biology; glioblastoma; cancer genes; microRNA; transcription factors; feed-forward loop; gene regulation; functional analysis; integration analysis; pathway; brain tumours; carcinogenesis; transcriptional aberrations.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCBDD.2011.041006

International Journal of Computational Biology and Drug Design, 2011 Vol.4 No.2, pp.111 - 126

Published online: 24 Jan 2015 *

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