Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Authors

    Language

    English

    Publication Date

    7-15-2020

    Journal

    Briefings in Bioinformatics

    DOI

    10.1093/bib/bbz082

    PMID

    31589286

    PMCID

    PMC7412957

    PubMedCentral® Posted Date

    10-7-2019

    PubMedCentral® Full Text Version

    Post-print

    Abstract

    Cleft palate (CP) is the second most common congenital birth defect. The etiology of CP is complicated, with involvement of various genetic and environmental factors. To investigate the gene regulatory mechanisms, we designed a powerful regulatory analytical approach to identify the conserved regulatory networks in humans and mice, from which we identified critical microRNAs (miRNAs), target genes and regulatory motifs (miRNA-TF-gene) related to CP. Using our manually curated genes and miRNAs with evidence in CP in humans and mice, we constructed miRNA and transcription factor (TF) co-regulation networks for both humans and mice. A consensus regulatory loop (miR17/miR20a-FOXE1-PDGFRA) and eight miRNAs (miR-140, miR-17, miR-18a, miR-19a, miR-19b, miR-20a, miR-451a and miR-92a) were discovered in both humans and mice. The role of miR-140, which had the strongest association with CP, was investigated in both human and mouse palate cells. The overexpression of miR-140-5p, but not miR-140-3p, significantly inhibited cell proliferation. We further examined whether miR-140 overexpression could suppress the expression of its predicted target genes (BMP2, FGF9, PAX9 and PDGFRA). Our results indicated that miR-140-5p overexpression suppressed the expression of BMP2 and FGF9 in cultured human palate cells and Fgf9 and Pdgfra in cultured mouse palate cells. In summary, our conserved miRNA-TF-gene regulatory network approach is effective in detecting consensus miRNAs, motifs, and regulatory mechanisms in human and mouse CP.

    Keywords

    Animals, Cleft Palate, Conserved Sequence, Gene Regulatory Networks, Humans, Mice, MicroRNAs, Transcription Factors

    Published Open-Access

    yes

    Share

    COinS
     
     

    To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
    you may Download the file to your hard drive.

    NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.