Molecular Biology and Genetics / Moleküler Biyoloji ve Genetik
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/11147/9
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Article Citation - WoS: 19Citation - Scopus: 24Intracytoplasmic Re-Localization of Mirisc Complexes(Frontiers Media S.A., 2018) Akgül, Bünyamin; Erdoğan, İpekMicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a conserved class of non-coding RNAs of 22 nucleotides that post-transcriptionally regulate gene expression through translational repression and/or mRNA degradation. A great progress has been made regarding miRNA biogenesis and miRNA-mediated gene regulation. Additionally, an ample amount of information exists with respect to the regulation of miRNAs. However, the cytoplasmic localization of miRNAs and its effect on gene regulatory output is still in progress. We provide a current review of the cytoplasmic miRNA localization in metazoans. We then discuss the dynamic changes in the intracytoplasmic localization of miRNAs as a means to regulate their silencing activity. We then conclude our discussion with the potential molecules that could modulate miRNA localization.Article Citation - WoS: 10Citation - Scopus: 11Intersection of Microrna and Gene Regulatory Networks and Their Implication in Cancer(Bentham Science Publishers B.V., 2014) Yousef, Malik; Trinh, Hung V.; Allmer, JensMicroRNAs (miRNAs) have attracted heightened attention for their role as post-transcriptional regulators of gene expression. It has become clear that miRNAs can both up- and downregulate protein expression. According to current estimates, most human genes are harboring miRNAs and/or are regulated by them. Thus miRNAs form a complex network of expression regulation which tightly interacts with known gene regulatory networks. Similar to some transcription factors, some miRNAs can have hundreds of target transcripts whose expression they modulate. Thus miRNAs can form complex regulatory networks by themselves, but because their expression is often tightly coordinated with gene expression, they form an intertwined regulatory network with many possible interactions among gene and miRNA regulatory pathways. In this review we first consider gene regulatory networks. Then we discuss microRNAs and their implication in cancer and how they may form regulatory networks. Finally, we give our perspective and provide an outlook including the aspect of personalized medicine.Article Citation - WoS: 11Citation - Scopus: 14Categorization of Species Based on Their Micrornas Employing Sequence Motifs, Information-Theoretic Sequence Feature Extraction, and K-Mers(Springer Verlag, 2017) Yousef, Malik; Nigatu, Dawit; Levy, Dalit; Allmer, Jens; Henkel, WernerBackground: Diseases like cancer can manifest themselves through changes in protein abundance, and microRNAs (miRNAs) play a key role in the modulation of protein quantity. MicroRNAs are used throughout all kingdoms and have been shown to be exploited by viruses to modulate their host environment. Since the experimental detection of miRNAs is difficult, computational methods have been developed. Many such tools employ machine learning for pre-miRNA detection, and many features for miRNA parameterization have been proposed. To train machine learning models, negative data is of importance yet hard to come by; therefore, we recently started to employ pre-miRNAs from one species as positive data versus another species’ pre-miRNAs as negative examples based on sequence motifs and k-mers. Here, we introduce the additional usage of information-theoretic (IT) features. Results: Pre-miRNAs from one species were used as positive and another species’ pre-miRNAs as negative training data for machine learning. The categorization capability of IT and k-mer features was investigated. Both feature sets and their combinations yielded a very high accuracy, which is as good as the previously suggested sequence motif and k-mer based method. However, for obtaining a high performance, a sufficiently large phylogenetic distance between the species and sufficiently high number of pre-miRNAs in the training set is required. To examine the contribution of the IT and k-mer features, an information gain-based feature ranking was performed. Although the top 3 are IT features, 80% of the top 100 features are k-mers. The comparison of all three individual approaches (motifs, IT, and k-mers) shows that the distinction of species based on their pre-miRNAs k-mers are sufficient. Conclusions: IT sequence feature extraction enables the distinction among species and is less computationally expensive than motif calculations. However, since IT features need larger amounts of data to have enough statistics for producing highly accurate results, future categorization into species can be effectively done using k-mers only. The biological reasoning for this is the existence of a codon bias between species which can, at least, be observed in exonic miRNAs. Future work in this direction will be the ab initio detection of pre-miRNA. In addition, prediction of pre-miRNA from RNA-seq can be done.Article Citation - WoS: 20Citation - Scopus: 25Microrna Categorization Using Sequence Motifs and K-Mers(BioMed Central Ltd., 2017) Yousef, Malik; Khalifa, Waleed; Acar, İlhan Erkin; Allmer, JensBackground: Post-transcriptional gene dysregulation can be a hallmark of diseases like cancer and microRNAs (miRNAs) play a key role in the modulation of translation efficiency. Known pre-miRNAs are listed in miRBase, and they have been discovered in a variety of organisms ranging from viruses and microbes to eukaryotic organisms. The computational detection of pre-miRNAs is of great interest, and such approaches usually employ machine learning to discriminate between miRNAs and other sequences. Many features have been proposed describing pre-miRNAs, and we have previously introduced the use of sequence motifs and k-mers as useful ones. There have been reports of xeno-miRNAs detected via next generation sequencing. However, they may be contaminations and to aid that important decision-making process, we aimed to establish a means to differentiate pre-miRNAs from different species. Results: To achieve distinction into species, we used one species' pre-miRNAs as the positive and another species' pre-miRNAs as the negative training and test data for the establishment of machine learned models based on sequence motifs and k-mers as features. This approach resulted in higher accuracy values between distantly related species while species with closer relation produced lower accuracy values. Conclusions: We were able to differentiate among species with increasing success when the evolutionary distance increases. This conclusion is supported by previous reports of fast evolutionary changes in miRNAs since even in relatively closely related species a fairly good discrimination was possible.