Ferro Elsi, Enrico Bena Chiara, Grigolon Silvia, Bosia Carla
Italian Institute for Genomic Medicine, Italy.
The Francis Crick Institute, 1, Midland Road, London NW1 1AT, UK.
Comput Struct Biotechnol J. 2020 Mar 10;18:642-649. doi: 10.1016/j.csbj.2020.02.020. eCollection 2020.
In the past decades, microRNAs (miRNA) have much attracted the attention of researchers at the interface between life and theoretical sciences for their involvement in post-transcriptional regulation and related diseases. Thanks to the always more sophisticated experimental techniques, the role of miRNAs as "noise processing units" has been further elucidated and two main ways of miRNA noise-control have emerged by combinations of theoretical and experimental studies. While on one side miRNAs were thought to buffer gene expression noise, it has recently been suggested that miRNAs could also increase the cell-to-cell variability of their targets. In this Mini Review, we focus on the role of miRNAs in molecular noise processing and on the advantages as well as current limitations of theoretical modelling.
在过去几十年里，微小RNA（miRNA）因其参与转录后调控及相关疾病，在生命科学与理论科学交叉领域备受研究人员关注。得益于日益精密的实验技术，miRNA作为“噪声处理单元”的作用得到进一步阐明，理论与实验研究相结合，出现了两种主要的miRNA噪声控制方式。一方面，miRNA曾被认为可缓冲基因表达噪声，而最近有研究表明，miRNA也可能增加其靶标的细胞间变异性。在本综述中，我们聚焦于miRNA在分子噪声处理中的作用，以及理论建模的优势和当前局限性。
