/CancerMIRNome

CancerMIRNome - an interactive analysis and visualization database for miRNome profiles of human cancer

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CancerMIRNome

an interactive analysis and visualization database for miRNome profiles of human cancer


Citation

Please cite: Li, R., et al., CancerMIRNome: an interactive analysis and visualization database for miRNome profiles of human cancer. Nucleic Acids Research (2021)


Introduction

miRNAs in cancer

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of small endogenous non-coding RNAs of ~22nt in length that negatively regulate the expression of their target protein-coding genes. miRNAs play critical roles in many biological processes, such as cell proliferation, differentiation, and apoptosis. miRNAs may function as oncogenes or tumor suppressors. Mounting evidences have demonstrated that the expression of miRNAs is dysregulated in various types of human cancers, which makes them potential biomarkers for cancer diagnosis and prognosis.

Circulating miRNAs as promising diagnostic biomarkers

miRNAs can be released into extracellular body fluids, including blood. Circulating miRNAs are incorporated in extracellular vesicles (EVs) such as shed microvesicles (sMVs) and exosomes, apoptotic bodies, or form complexes with RNA binding proteins such as Argonates (AGOs). The protected circulating miRNAs are remarkably stable in the extracellular environment, thus have tremendous potential as non-invasive diagnostic biomarkers for early cancer detection.

About CancerMIRNome

CancerMIRNome is a comprehensive database with the huamn miRNome data of 33 cancer types from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), and 40 public cancer circulating miRNome profiling datasets from NCBI Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) and ArrayExpress.

CancerMIRNome provides a user-friendly interface and a suite of advanced functions for miRNA analysis both at a single miRNA level to explore the expression and function of a miRNA in many different cancers and at a dataset level to identify diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers for a specific cancer type.