Title: Deciphering the role of miRNAs during mouse embryonic development
Abstract:
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small RNA species that play a critical role as the post-transcriptional regulators of the genome. As part of the ENCODE project, the consortium have collected miRNA expression profiles of multiple tissues at 7 embryonic time points as well as p0 and found 581-687 miRNAs expressed in each tissue. 48% of the top expressed miRNAs are tissue specific in at least one of the developmental stages and/or increase in their tissue specificity as the embryo develops.
We utilized the dynamics of miRNA expression in order to cluster the miRNAs in a functionally meaningful manner. We compiled a list of predicted targets for each miRNA cluster and looked for mRNA clusters that are enriched for these targets. Finally, by considering both the correlation and enrichment analyses, we identified the miRNA and mRNA clusters that interact with each other and found that some miRNA clusters have a predicted role in down-regulation the expression of developmentally important genes in tissues outside their expected specific tissue during embryonic development.