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Research Paper

Exploration of prognosis-related microRNA and transcription factor co-regulatory networks across cancer types

, , , , , , , ORCID Icon, ORCID Icon & show all
Pages 1010-1021 | Received 05 Feb 2019, Accepted 10 Apr 2019, Published online: 03 May 2019
 

ABSTRACT

The study of cancer prognosis serves as an important part of cancer research. Large-scale cancer studies have identified numerous genes and microRNAs (miRNAs) associated with prognosis. These informative genes and miRNAs represent potential biomarkers to predict survival and to elucidate the molecular mechanism of tumour progression. MiRNAs and transcription factors (TFs) can work cooperatively as essential mediators of gene expression, and their dysregulation affects cancer prognosis. A panoramic view of cancer prognosis at the system level, considering the co-regulation roles of miRNA and TF, remains elusive. Here, we establish 12 prognosis-related miRNA-TF co-regulatory networks. The characteristics of prognostic target genes and their regulators in the network are depicted. Although the target genes and co-regulatory patterns exhibit cancer-specific properties, some miRNAs and TFs are highly conserved across cancers. We illustrate and interpret the roles of these conserved regulators by building a model associated with cancer hallmarks, functional enrichment analysis, network community detection, and exhaustive literature research. The elaborated system-level prognostic miRNA-TF co-regulation landscape, including the highlighted roles of conserved regulators, provides a novel and powerful insights into further biological and medical discoveries.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflicts of interest were disclosed.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by grants from the Major Research plan of The National Natural Science Foundation of China [No. U1435222], the National Natural Science Foundation of China [No. 31801112] and the National Natural Science Foundation of China [No. 61873276].