Systematic analysis of the p53-related microRNAs in breast cancer revealing their essential roles in the cell cycle

Numerous miRNAs have been found to be involved in the regulation of the p53 signaling pathway. Conversely, p53 regulates the transcription or processing of microRNAs (miRNAs). Given that complexities in the association between p53 and miRNAs exist, and due to the rapidly increasing amount of literature regarding the interactions between p53 and miRNAs, the present study systematically analyzed the associations between miRNAs and p53 in breast cancer using a literature-based discovery approach, natural language processing. A total of 22 miRNAs were found to be associated with p53. Next, three popular online tools (PicTar, miRanda and TargetScan) were used to predict the targets of each miRNA, and certain targets were validated by experiments. Gene Ontology annotation and network analysis demonstrated that the majority of the targets of the p53-related miRNAs were enriched in the cell cycle process. These results suggest that, in addition to regulating the transcription of cell cycle-related genes, p53 also indirectly modulates the cell cycle via miRNAs.