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Aberrant allele frequencies of the SNPs located in microRNA target sites are potentially associated with human cancers

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of noncoding small RNAs that regulate gene expression by base pairing with target mRNAs at the 3′-terminal untranslated regions (3′-UTRs), leading to mRNA cleavage or translational repression. Single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) located at miRNA-binding sites (miRNA...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Yu, Zhenbao, Li, Zhen, Jolicoeur, Normand, Zhang, Linhua, Fortin, Yves, Wang, Edwin, Wu, Meiqun, Shen, Shi-Hsiang
Formato: Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Oxford University Press 2007
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1935019/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17584784
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkm480
Descripción
Sumario:MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of noncoding small RNAs that regulate gene expression by base pairing with target mRNAs at the 3′-terminal untranslated regions (3′-UTRs), leading to mRNA cleavage or translational repression. Single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) located at miRNA-binding sites (miRNA-binding SNPs) are likely to affect the expression of the miRNA target and may contribute to the susceptibility of humans to common diseases. We herein performed a genome-wide analysis of SNPs located in the miRNA-binding sites of the 3′-UTR of various human genes. We found that miRNA-binding SNPs are negatively selected in respect to SNP distribution between the miRNA-binding ‘seed’ sequence and the entire 3′-UTR sequence. Furthermore, we comprehensively defined the expression of each miRNA-binding SNP in cancers versus normal tissues through mining EST databases. Interestingly, we found that some miRNA-binding SNPs exhibit significant different allele frequencies between the human cancer EST libraries and the dbSNP database. More importantly, using human cancer specimens against the dbSNP database for case-control association studies, we found that twelve miRNA-binding SNPs indeed display an aberrant allele frequency in human cancers. Hence, SNPs located in miRNA-binding sites affect miRNA target expression and function, and are potentially associated with cancers.