Epi-miRNAs: A Subclass of MiRNAs in Cancer

Introduction: Cancer is due to the accumulation of genetics and epigenetics changes in cells. Aberrant methylation of CpG rich sequences as an epigenetic change has been observed in almost every human cancer. A large part of malignancies causing genes regulate with microRNAs (miRNAs) that bind to 3΄ untranslated region (3΄UTR) of mRNAs. A subclass of miRNAs, named “epi-miRNAs”, which target epigenetic regulators such as DNA methyltransferases (DNMTs), HDACs or components of the polycomb repressor complexes, have proven to contribute to the epigenetic cellular landscape and represent novel tools to revert aberrant epigenetic alterations commonly found in neoplasm .Description: Comprehensive survey performed by searching in pathway analysis database such as KEGG and STRING to provide the list of genes that were involved in epigenetic especially in cancer. In second step we checked miRNA databases such as miRanda, TargetScan and miRTarBase to find miRNAs that target these genes. Finally, with perfect literature review multiple literature databases such as Google Scholar, Web of Science, Scopus and PubMed databases for reach to articles that reported expression of these miRNAs in cancers.Discussion and conclusion: Our survey demonstrates that DNA methylation is regulated by several genes including: family of DNMTs, HDAC and HAT genes family. In other hand we list several miRNAs that targeted these genes with two categories: predicted and validated. For example, some of validated miRNAs including: miR-148a, miR152, miR-222 and miR-29 directly target the mRNA for DNMT1 at 3’UTR. In details miR-148a and miR-152 targeted DNMT1 and miR-29 directly targets DNMT3a and DNMT3b. another miRNAs including miR-101, miR-290 and …, that targeting EZH2, RBL2 and other genes that involve in epigenetic regulation. Finally, regard to importance of epigenetic change in cancers, we propose that in future research detection of these miRNAs, in tissue also in serum/plasma, may enhance the sensitivity and specificity of diagnostic and prognostic tests for early-stage many type of cancer.

کلیدواژه ها:

Epi-miRNA ، Cancer ، epigenetic