Hematological malignancies: role of miRNAs and their in silico aspects

Abstract

Hematological malignancies is a broad term that includes blood cell cancers including chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), acute myeloid leukemia (AML), Myelodysplastic syndrome, acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL), multiple myelomas (MM) and lymphomas. miRNAs are ~22-nt long non-coding RNAs that play a very important role in gene regulation by binding to mRNA at their complementary sequence. These miRNAs are conceptually connected with various signal and pathway networks that make them capable of regulating various diseases including hematological malignancies. These miRNAs are not only playing regulatory roles in hematological malignancies, but are also providing new potent markers for efficient diagnosis and prognosis for hematological malignancies patients. Since the discovery of very first miRNA, the importance and role of miRNAs have been established in various fields, and there is a need to search for new potent miRNAs and their targets. A large amount of sequence data have been generated in last few years, which has further generated the need to develop efficient and reliable computational tools to analyze and extract out relevant information promptly from raw data. Here, we review various possible roles played by miRNA in hematological malignancies, principles involved in miRNA gene identification, target prediction and their preceding role in hematological malignancies research.

Keywords::

• gene regulation
• hematological malignancies
• leukemia
• miRNA
• miRNA identification
• noncoding RNAs

Financial & competing interests disclosure

The authors thank the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), India for support in writing this review. The CSIR-CDRI institutional number allocated for this manuscript is 8522. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending or royalties.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.

Key issues

• • Hematological malignancies is one of the most common type of cancer

• • miRNAs are found to have important role in hematological malignancies, it plays a therapeutic as well as diagnostic role in hematological malignancies, as it controls the expression of genes involved in development and differentiation.

• • The role of genetic network to provide novel targets against already existing miRNAs should be exploited.

• • Though the application of miRNAs has proved itself as a very attractive and powerful tool, still the traditional therapies are time consuming and results in feeble treatment outcome; therefore, an involvement of computational approach is strongly needed, that will greatly reduce the testing time of a number of possible combinatorial relationships between the miRNAs and the genes responsible for hematological malignancies.

• • A number of online tools and softwares are available for miRNA prediction and identification.