Department of Bioinformatics, School of Geographic and Biologic Information, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, 210023, China.
Department of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, 211166, China.
Sci Rep. 2017 Jan 3;7:39812. doi: 10.1038/srep39812.
Recent studies suggest that mRNAs may be differentially expressed between males and females. This study aimed to perform expression analysis of mRNA and its main regulatory molecule, microRNA (miRNA), to discuss the potential sex-specific expression patterns using abnormal expression profiles from The Cancer Genome Atlas database. Generally, deregulated miRNAs and mRNAs had consistent expression between males and females, but some miRNAs may be oppositely expressed in specific diseases: up-regulated in one group and down-regulated in another. Studies of miRNA gene families and clusters further confirmed that these sequence or location related miRNAs might have opposing expression between sexes. The specific miRNA might have greater expression divergence across different groups, suggesting flexible expression across different individuals, especially in tumor samples. The typical analysis regardless of the sex will ignore or balance these sex-specific deregulated miRNAs. Compared with flexible miRNAs, their targets of mRNAs showed relative stable expression between males and females. These relevant results provide new insights into miRNA-mRNA interaction and sex difference.
最近的研究表明，mRNA 在男性和女性之间可能存在差异表达。本研究旨在使用来自癌症基因组图谱数据库的异常表达谱，对 mRNA 及其主要调节分子 microRNA (miRNA) 的表达进行分析，以探讨潜在的性别特异性表达模式。一般来说，男性和女性之间的失调 miRNA 和 mRNA 具有一致的表达，但在某些特定疾病中，某些 miRNA 可能呈现相反的表达模式：在一组中上调，在另一组中下调。miRNA 基因家族和簇的研究进一步证实，这些序列或位置相关的 miRNA 可能在性别之间存在相反的表达。特定的 miRNA 在不同群体之间可能具有更大的表达差异，表明在不同个体中具有更大的表达灵活性，特别是在肿瘤样本中。典型的不考虑性别的分析将忽略或平衡这些性别特异性失调的 miRNA。与灵活的 miRNA 相比，其 mRNA 靶标在男性和女性之间表现出相对稳定的表达。这些相关结果为 miRNA-mRNA 相互作用和性别差异提供了新的见解。
