Project description:Milk is the body fluid richest in microRNAs (miRNAs), which are small (18-25nt) non-coding RNAs, regulating many biological processes and thus influencing human health. With the objective of determining their bioavailability in processed dairy products, we studied three commercial butters. To examine the presence or not of miRNAs in butter, we first investigated six miRNAs by RT-qPCR. Following the affirmative result, we established butter miRNomes using small-RNA-Seq, which identified 526 miRNAs, including 50% in common with a milk and milk fat miRNome. The three butters did not have exactly the same TOP 30 miRNAs and were not the exact mirror of the TOP 30 of the miRNAs already reported in Holstein milk and milk fat miRNomes, suggesting differences during the butter production process or storage. Prediction of the influence of the TOP 30 butter miRNAs showed potential effects on cell life and regulation of gene expression that could affect consumer health. In the future, the effects of miRNAs bioavailability on the health of human consuming dairy products will need to be considered. Our results highlight the importance of expanding our understanding of the bioavailability of food miRNAs, including in various processed dairy foods.
Project description:Due to their role in tumorigenesis and remarkable stability in body fluids, microRNAs (miRNAs) are emerging as a promising diagnostic tool. The aim of this study was to identify tumor miRNA signatures for the discrimination of breast cancer and the intrinsic molecular subtypes, and the study in plasma of the status of the most significant ones in order to identify potential circulating biomarkers for breast cancer detection.
Project description:Plasma samples from 100 early stage (I to IIIA) non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients and 100 non-cancer controls were screened for 754 circulating microRNAs via qRT-PCR, using TaqMan MicroRNA Arrays. Our objective was to identify a panel of circulating microRNAs in plasma that will contribute to early detection of lung cancer.
Project description:MicroRNAs are conserved, endogenous small RNAs with critical post-transcriptional regulatory functions throughout eukaryota, including prominent roles in development and disease. Despite much effort, microRNA annotations still contain errors and are incomplete due especially to challenges related to identifying valid miRs that have small numbers of reads, to properly locating hairpin precursors and to balancing precision and recall. Here, we present miRWoods, which solves these challenges using a duplex-focused precursor detection method and stacked random forests with specialized layers to detect mature and precursor microRNAs, and has been tuned to optimize the harmonic mean of precision and recall. We trained and tuned our discovery pipeline on data sets from the well-annotated human genome, and evaluated its performance on data from mouse. Compared to existing approaches, miRWoods better identifies precursor spans, and can balance sensitivity and specificity for an overall greater prediction accuracy, recalling an average of 10% more annotated microRNAs, and correctly predicts substantially more microRNAs with only one read. We apply this method to the under-annotated genomes of Felis catus (domestic cat) and Bos taurus (cow). We identified hundreds of novel microRNAs in small RNA sequencing data sets from muscle and skin from cat, from 10 tissues from cow and also from human and mouse cells. Our novel predictions include a microRNA in an intron of tyrosine kinase 2 (TYK2) that is present in both cat and cow, as well as a family of mirtrons with two instances in the human genome. Our predictions support a more expanded miR-2284 family in the bovine genome, a larger mir-548 family in the human genome, and a larger let-7 family in the feline genome.
Project description:Due to their role in tumorigenesis and remarkable stability in body fluids, microRNAs (miRNAs) are emerging as a promising diagnostic tool. The aim of this study was to identify tumor miRNA signatures for the discrimination of breast cancer and the intrinsic molecular subtypes, and the study in plasma of the status of the most significant ones in order to identify potential circulating biomarkers for breast cancer detection. MiRNA expression profiling of 1919 human miRNAs was conducted in 122 FFPE breast tumors (31 luminal A, 33 luminal B, 27 Her2 and 31 triple negative) and 11 normal breast tissues using LNA based miRNA microarrays. Breast tumors were divided into a training (n=61) and a test set (n=61). Both series comprised a similar number of samples from each molecular subtype. Differential expression analysis was performed and microarray classifiers were developed with samples from the training set and validated in samples from the test set. The most relevant miRNAs were validated by quantitative PCR and analyzed in plasma from 36 pretreated patients, 47 postreated patients and 26 healthy individuals. In addition, further validation in 114 pretreated patients and 116 healthy individuals was performed.
Project description:Plant-based diets could be a key source of microRNAs in animals. Plant microRNAs are cross-kingdom gene expression regulators that could modulate mammalian gene expression, influencing their physiology. Therefore, it is important to identify the microRNA expression profile of plant foods in order to identify potential target genes and biological functions in the mammalian host. Next-generation sequencing was applied to identify microRNAs in RNA samples derived from nuts (walnut and almond), vegetables (spinach) and fruits (orange, apple, olive, pear, and tomato). Our data revealed that edible plant contain a large number and diverse type of microRNAs.
Project description:Objective was to identify urine cell-free microRNAs enabling early non-invasive detection of bladder cancer. Total RNA enriched for fraction of short RNAs was isolated using Urine microRNA purification kit (Norgen corp.). miRNA profiles were determined using the Affymetrix GeneChip miRNA 3.0 array and analyzed to identify differentially deregulated miRNA in bladder cancer patients compared with helathy controls.
Project description:Gene expression in mammalian testis undergoing spermatogenesis is under strict post transcriptional regulation and microRNAs are known to play a role in this regulation. Considering the time window of first wave of spermatogenesis, we did a microarray profiling of total testicular microRNAs in mouse and found several significant patterns of variable expression of these molecules during the different stages analyzed here.