MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of small endogenous non-coding genes that play important roles in post-transcriptional regulation as well as other important biological processes. Accumulating evidence indicated that miRNAs were extensively involved in the pathology of cancer. However, determining which miRNAs are related to a specific cancer is problematic because one miRNA may target multiple genes and one gene may be targeted by multiple miRNAs. The authors proposed a new approach, named miR_SubPath, to identify cancer-associated miRNAs by three steps. The targeted genes were determined based on differentially expressed genes in significant dysfunctional subpathways. Then the candidate miRNAs were determined according to miRNA-genes associations. Finally, these candidate miRNAs were ranked based on their relations with some seed miRNAs in a functional similarity network. Results on real-world datasets showed that the proposed miR_SubPath method was more robust and could identify more cancer-related miRNAs than a prior approach, miR_Path, miR_Clust and Zhang's method.

中文翻译：

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基于亚通路识别癌症相关的 microRNA。

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) 是一类小的内源性非编码基因，在转录后调控以及其他重要的生物学过程中发挥着重要作用。越来越多的证据表明，miRNA 广泛参与癌症的病理学。然而，确定哪些 miRNA 与特定癌症相关是有问题的，因为一个 miRNA 可能靶向多个基因，而一个基因可能被多个 miRNA 靶向。作者提出了一种名为 miR_SubPath 的新方法，通过三个步骤来识别癌症相关的 miRNA。基于显着功能失调亚途径中的差异表达基因确定靶向基因。然后根据miRNA-基因关联确定候选miRNA。最后，这些候选 miRNA 根据它们与功能相似性网络中的一些种子 miRNA 的关系进行排序。真实世界数据集的结果表明，与先前的方法 miR_Path、miR_Clust 和 Zhang 的方法相比，所提出的 miR_SubPath 方法更稳健，并且可以识别更多与癌症相关的 miRNA。