ABSTRACT: In most cases human papillomavirus (HPV) infections are cleared from the cervical cells by the immune system itself, but in a few cases, where there is persistent HPV infection, it can lead to cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) progression and ultimately invasive cervical carcinoma. The cytopathic effect is in general accompanied by chronic inflammation, which produces inflammation cytokines that contribute to DNA damage, and at the same time, aberrations occurred in the host DNA repair mechanisms, thus lead to HPV genomic integration into the host cells which propels cell immortalization. In this study, we reported the genome-wide expression profiles of both microRNAs (miRNAs) and mRNAs from 24 cervical samples with consecutive stages of normal, CIN I (mild dysplasia) and CIN III (severe dysplasia and carcinoma in situ), and presented the SIG++ algorithm which is founded on the evolution process of intermolecular regulation change during disease progression, to identify the significant change of miRNA-mRNA regulations rather than the expression change, across different disease stages, thereupon elucidating the molecular mechanisms of increasing host genomic instability as disease progresses. As reconstructing miRNA differential networks, we found that at each stage of CIN, there respectively exists specific miRNA regulations mediating chronic inflammation persistence, genome instability and cell survival, which coordinately carrys out the integration of HPV genomes into the host cell genomes, and finally results in cell immortalization. Beyond the specific implications for cervical carcinogenesis, this work establishes a new framework for studying the biology of miRNAs in pathogenesis from the perspective of miRNA differential regulation, and helps ensure the comprehensiveness of miRNA-mediated genetic regulatory pathways. There are totally 24 clinical samples in this study comprises three stages: 7 normal cervix samples (HPV-), 9 CIN I samples (HPV+) and CIN III samples (HPV+), where normal refers to the adjacent tissue of early lesions. For each sample, its total RNA was extracted and purified, then separately hybridized to Illumina HumanHT-12 V4.0 expression beadchip (gene symbol) and Illumina Human v2 MicroRNA Expression BeadChip, for examining the expression profiles of mRNAs and miRNAs, respectively.
