Coexpression Network Analysis of miRNA-142 Overexpression in Neuronal Cells

MicroRNAs are small noncoding RNA molecules, which are differentially expressed in diverse biological processes and are also involved in the regulation of multiple genes. A number of sites in the 3′ untranslated regions (UTRs) of different mRNAs allow complimentary binding for a microRNA, leading to their posttranscriptional regulation. The miRNA-142 is one of the microRNAs overexpressed in neurons that is found to regulate SIRT1 and MAOA genes. Differential analysis of gene expression data, which is focused on identifying up- or downregulated genes, ignores many relationships between genes affected by miRNA-142 overexpression in a cell. Thus, we applied a correlation network model to identify the coexpressed genes and to study the impact of miRNA-142 overexpression on this network. Combining multiple sources of knowledge is useful to infer meaningful relationships in systems biology. We applied coexpression model on the data obtained from wild type and miR-142 overexpression neuronal cells and integrated miRNA seed sequence mapping information to identify genes greatly affected by this overexpression. Larger differences in the enriched networks revealed that the nervous system development related genes such as TEAD2, PLEKHA6, and POGLUT1 were greatly impacted due to miRNA-142 overexpression.