Liu Wendao, Shomron Noam
Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel.
Edmond J. Safra Center for Bioinformatics, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 6329302, Israel.
J Pers Med. 2022 Oct 21;12(10):1750. doi: 10.3390/jpm12101750.
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) regulate gene expression by binding to mRNAs, and thus reduce target gene expression levels and expression variability, also known as 'noise'. Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technology has been used to study miRNA and mRNA expression in single cells. To evaluate scRNA-seq as a tool for investigating miRNA regulation, we analyzed datasets with both mRNA and miRNA expression in single-cell format. We found that miRNAs slightly reduce the expression noise of target genes; however, this effect is easily masked by strong technical noise from scRNA-seq. We suggest improvements aimed at reducing technical noise, which can be implemented in experimental design and computational analysis prior to running scRNA-seq. Our study provides useful guidelines for experiments that evaluate the effect of miRNAs on mRNA expression from scRNA-seq.
微小RNA（miRNA）通过与信使核糖核酸（mRNA）结合来调控基因表达，从而降低靶基因的表达水平和表达变异性，即所谓的“噪音”。单细胞RNA测序（scRNA-seq）技术已被用于研究单细胞中的miRNA和mRNA表达。为了评估scRNA-seq作为研究miRNA调控工具的有效性，我们分析了单细胞形式的mRNA和miRNA表达数据集。我们发现，miRNA会略微降低靶基因的表达噪音；然而，这种效应很容易被scRNA-seq产生的强烈技术噪音所掩盖。我们建议进行改进以减少技术噪音，这些改进可以在进行scRNA-seq之前的实验设计和计算分析中实施。我们的研究为评估miRNA对scRNA-seq中mRNA表达影响的实验提供了有用的指导方针。
