BINDING SITE ANALYSIS OF MICRORNAS TARGET INTERACTION FROM GENOME WIDE ASSOCIATION STUDIES

Abstract

Objective: Identification of micro RNAs (miRNAs) as a biomarker to diagnose and treat auto immune diseases is a challenge in the era of post genomics and the ability to apply an accurate computational approach leads to the initiation of discovering novel biomarkers. Methods: Initially we have identified the list of genes from a database which contain a catalog of Genome Wide Association Study (GWAS) and then we have identified the predicted miRNAs from TargetScan. Finally we have found the connectivity map between the gene and validated miRNA target from miRmap and the number of binding sites were analyzed for each pair (gene-miRNA). Results: We have applied the above mentioned approach to Psoriasis. In case of Psoriasis, 15 distinct genes are present in GWAS and among them; TRAF3IP2, KCNH7, CAST, NOS2, STAT2, IL23R and CoG6 contain predicted miRNAs in TargetScan. Finally, the number of mRNA binding sites were analyzed for miRNAs obtained from TargetScan and it has been found that the binding of hsa-miR-520d-5p and hsa-miR-524-5p with the mRNA of TRAF3IP2 is more stable than the binding of other miRNAs with their respective genes on the basis of binding site analysis and hence there is a maximum probability for the utilization of hsa-miR-520d-5p and hsa-miR-524-5p as a biomarker for Psoriasis. Conclusion: At present we have applied our model for Psoriasis. In future, we will be applying our methodology to other auto immune diseases for identifying a miRNA based biomarker. Keywords: miRNAs, auto immune diseases, post genomics, GWAS, TargetScan and miRmap