School of Information and Control Engineering, China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou, China.
School of Mathematics, Liaoning University.
Brief Bioinform. 2019 Mar 22;20(2):515-539. doi: 10.1093/bib/bbx130.
Plenty of microRNAs (miRNAs) were discovered at a rapid pace in plants, green algae, viruses and animals. As one of the most important components in the cell, miRNAs play a growing important role in various essential and important biological processes. For the recent few decades, amounts of experimental methods and computational models have been designed and implemented to identify novel miRNA-disease associations. In this review, the functions of miRNAs, miRNA-target interactions, miRNA-disease associations and some important publicly available miRNA-related databases were discussed in detail. Specially, considering the important fact that an increasing number of miRNA-disease associations have been experimentally confirmed, we selected five important miRNA-related human diseases and five crucial disease-related miRNAs and provided corresponding introductions. Identifying disease-related miRNAs has become an important goal of biomedical research, which will accelerate the understanding of disease pathogenesis at the molecular level and molecular tools design for disease diagnosis, treatment and prevention. Computational models have become an important means for novel miRNA-disease association identification, which could select the most promising miRNA-disease pairs for experimental validation and significantly reduce the time and cost of the biological experiments. Here, we reviewed 20 state-of-the-art computational models of predicting miRNA-disease associations from different perspectives. Finally, we summarized four important factors for the difficulties of predicting potential disease-related miRNAs, the framework of constructing powerful computational models to predict potential miRNA-disease associations including five feasible and important research schemas, and future directions for further development of computational models.
大量的 microRNAs（miRNAs）在植物、绿藻、病毒和动物中被快速发现。作为细胞中最重要的组成部分之一，miRNAs 在各种重要的生物学过程中发挥着越来越重要的作用。在最近几十年中，已经设计和实施了大量的实验方法和计算模型来识别新的 miRNA-疾病关联。在这篇综述中，详细讨论了 miRNAs 的功能、miRNA-靶相互作用、miRNA-疾病关联以及一些重要的公开 miRNA 相关数据库。特别地，考虑到越来越多的 miRNA-疾病关联已被实验证实的重要事实，我们选择了五种重要的 miRNA 相关人类疾病和五种关键的疾病相关 miRNA，并提供了相应的介绍。鉴定疾病相关的 miRNAs 已成为生物医学研究的一个重要目标，这将加速在分子水平上对疾病发病机制的理解以及设计用于疾病诊断、治疗和预防的分子工具。计算模型已成为识别新的 miRNA-疾病关联的重要手段，它可以为实验验证选择最有前途的 miRNA-疾病对，并显著减少生物学实验的时间和成本。在这里，我们回顾了 20 种从不同角度预测 miRNA-疾病关联的最先进的计算模型。最后，我们总结了预测潜在疾病相关 miRNAs 困难的四个重要因素，构建用于预测潜在 miRNA-疾病关联的强大计算模型的框架，包括五个可行且重要的研究方案，以及计算模型进一步发展的未来方向。
