PubMed İndeksli Yayınlar Koleksiyonu / PubMed Indexed Publications Collection

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/11147/7645

Browse

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 15
  • Article
    Citation - WoS: 14
    Visualization and Analysis of Micrornas Within Kegg Pathways Using Vanesa
    (Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2017) Hamzeiy, Hamid; Suluyayla, Rabia; Brinkrolf, Christoph; Janowski, Sebastian Jan; Hofestaedt, Ralf; Allmer, Jens
    MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small RNA molecules which are known to take part in post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression. Here, VANESA, an existing platform for reconstructing, visualizing, and analysis of large biological networks, has been further expanded to include all experimentally validated human miRNAs available within miRBase, TarBase and miRTarBase. This is done by integrating a custom hybrid miRNA database to DAWIS-M.D., VANESA's main data source, enabling the visualization and analysis of miRNAs within large biological pathways such as those found within the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG). Interestingly, 99.15 % of human KEGG pathways either contain genes which are targeted by miRNAs or harbor them. This is mainly due to the high number of interaction partners that each miRNA could have (e.g.: hsa-miR-335-5p targets 2544 genes and 71 miRNAs target NUFIP2). We demonstrate the usability of our system by analyzing the measles virus KEGG pathway as a proof-of-principle model and further highlight the importance of integrating miRNAs (both experimentally validated and predicted) into biological networks for the elucidation of novel miRNA-mRNA interactions of biological importance.
  • Article
    Citation - WoS: 4
    Citation - Scopus: 4
    Improving the Quality of Positive Datasets for the Establishment of Machine Learning Models for Pre-Microrna Detection
    (Informationsmanagement in der Biotechnologie e.V. (IMBio e.V.), 2017) Saçar Demirci, Müşerref Duygu; Allmer, Jens
    MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are involved in the post-transcriptional regulation of protein abundance and thus have a great impact on the resulting phenotype. It is, therefore, no wonder that they have been implicated in many diseases ranging from virus infections to cancer. This impact on the phenotype leads to a great interest in establishing the miRNAs of an organism. Experimental methods are complicated which led to the development of computational methods for pre-miRNA detection. Such methods generally employ machine learning to establish models for the discrimination between miRNAs and other sequences. Positive training data for model establishment, for the most part, stems from miRBase, the miRNA registry. The quality of the entries in miRBase has been questioned, though. This unknown quality led to the development of filtering strategies in attempts to produce high quality positive datasets which can lead to a scarcity of positive data. To analyze the quality of filtered data we developed a machine learning model and found it is well able to establish data quality based on intrinsic measures. Additionally, we analyzed which features describing pre-miRNAs could discriminate between low and high quality data. Both models are applicable to data from miRBase and can be used for establishing high quality positive data. This will facilitate the development of better miRNA detection tools which will make the prediction of miRNAs in disease states more accurate. Finally, we applied both models to all miRBase data and provide the list of high quality hairpins.
  • Article
    Citation - Scopus: 10
    Visualization and Analysis of Mirnas Implicated in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Within Gene Regulatory Pathways
    (IOS Press, 2018) Hamzeiy, Hamid; Allmer, Jens; Suluyayla, Rabia; Brinkrolf, Christoph; Janowski, Sebastian Jan; Hofestadt, Ralf; Allmer, Jens
    MicroRNAs (miRNAs), approximately 22 nucleotides long, post-transcriptionally active gene expression regulators, play active roles in modulating cellular processes. Gene regulation and miRNA regulation are intertwined and the main aim of this study is to facilitate the analysis of miRNAs within gene regulatory pathways. VANESA enables the reconstruction of biological pathways and supports visualization and simulation. To support integrative miRNA and gene pathway analyses, a custom database of experimentally proven miRNAs, integrating data from miRBase, TarBase and miRTarBase, was added to DAWIS-M.D., which is the main data source for VANESA. Analysis of human KEGG pathways within DAWIS-M.D. showed that 661 miRNAs (~1/3 recorded human miRNAs) lead to 65,474 interactions. hsa-miR-335-5p targets most genes in our system (2,544); while the most targeted gene (with 71 miRNAs) is NUFIP2 (Nuclear Fragile X Mental Retardation Protein Interacting Protein 2). Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), a complex neurodegenerative disease, was chosen as a proof of concept model. Using our system, it was possible to reduce the initially several hundred genes and miRNAs associated with ALS to eight genes, 19 miRNAs and 31 interactions. This highlights the effectiveness of the implemented system to distill important information from otherwise hard to access, highly convoluted and vast regulatory networks.
  • Article
    Citation - WoS: 11
    Citation - Scopus: 11
    The Expressed Microrna-Mrna Interactions of Toxoplasma Gondii
    (Frontiers Media S.A., 2018) Acar, İlhan Erkin; Saçar Demirci, Müşerref Duygu; Groß, Uwe; Allmer, Jens
    MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are involved in post-transcriptional modulation of gene expression and thereby have a large influence on the resulting phenotype. We have previously shown that miRNAs may be involved in the communication between Toxoplasma gondii and its hosts and further confirmed a number of proposed specific miRNAs. Yet, little is known about the internal regulation via miRNAs in T. gondii. Therefore, we predicted pre-miRNAs directly from the type II ME49 genome and filtered them. For the confident hairpins, we predicted the location of the mature miRNAs and established their target genes. To add further confidence, we evaluated whether the hairpins and their targets were co-expressed. Such co-expressed miRNA and target pairs define a functional interaction. We extracted all such functional interactions and analyzed their differential expression among strains of all three clonal lineages (RH, PLK, and CTG) and between the two stages present in the intermediate host (tachyzoites and bradyzoites). Overall, we found ~65,000 expressed interactions of which ~5,500 are differentially expressed among strains but none are significantly differentially expressed between developmental stages. Since miRNAs and target decoys can be used as therapeutics we believe that the list of interactions we provide will lead to novel approaches in the treatment of toxoplasmosis.
  • Article
    Citation - WoS: 10
    Citation - Scopus: 11
    Intersection of Microrna and Gene Regulatory Networks and Their Implication in Cancer
    (Bentham Science Publishers B.V., 2014) Yousef, Malik; Trinh, Hung V.; Allmer, Jens
    MicroRNAs (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: 16
    Citation - Scopus: 18
    Computational and Bioinformatics Methods for Microrna Gene Prediction
    (Humana Press, 2014) Allmer, Jens
    MicroRNAs (miRNAs) have attracted ever-increasing interest in recent years. Since experimental approaches for determining miRNAs are nontrivial in their application, computational methods for the prediction of miRNAs have gained popularity. Such methods can be grouped into two broad categories (1) performing ab initio predictions of miRNAs from primary sequence alone and (2) additionally employing phylogenetic conservation. Most methods acknowledge the importance of hairpin or stem-loop structures and employ various methods for the prediction of RNA secondary structure. Machine learning has been employed in both categories with classification being the predominant method. In most cases, positive and negative examples are necessary for performing classification. Since it is currently elusive to experimentally determine all possible miRNAs for an organism, true negative examples are hard to come by, and therefore the accuracy assessment of algorithms is hampered. In this chapter, first RNA secondary structure prediction is introduced since it provides a basis for miRNA prediction. This is followed by an assessment of homology and then ab initio miRNA prediction methods.
  • Article
    Citation - WoS: 37
    Citation - Scopus: 46
    Computational Methods for Microrna Target Prediction
    (Humana Press, 2014) Hamzeiy, Hamid; Yousef, Malik; Allmer, Jens
    MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are important players in gene regulation. The final and maybe the most important step in their regulatory pathway is the targeting. Targeting is the binding of the miRNA to the mature RNA via the RNA-induced silencing complex. Expression patterns of miRNAs are highly specific in respect to external stimuli, developmental stage, or tissue. This is used to diagnose diseases such as cancer in which the expression levels of miRNAs are known to change considerably. Newly identified miRNAs are increasing in number with every new release of miRBase which is the main online database providing miRNA sequences and annotation. Many of these newly identified miRNAs do not yet have identified targets. This is especially the case in animals where the miRNA does not bind to its target as perfectly as it does in plants. Valid targets need to be identified for miRNAs in order to properly understand their role in cellular pathways. Experimental methods for target validations are difficult, expensive, and time consuming. Having considered all these facts it is of crucial importance to have accurate computational miRNA target predictions. There are many proposed methods and algorithms available for predicting targets for miRNAs, but only a few have been developed to become available as independent tools and software. There are also databases which collect and store information regarding predicted miRNA targets. Current approaches to miRNA target prediction produce a huge amount of false positive and an unknown amount of false negative results, and thus the need for better approaches is evermore evident. This chapter aims to give some detail about the current tools and approaches used for miRNA target prediction, provides some grounds for their comparison, and outlines a possible future.
  • Article
    Citation - WoS: 37
    Citation - Scopus: 45
    On the Performance of Pre-Microrna Detection Algorithms
    (Nature Publishing Group, 2017) Saçar Demirci, Müşerref Duygu; Baumbach, Jan; Allmer, Jens
    MicroRNAs are crucial for post-transcriptional gene regulation, and their dysregulation has been associated with diseases like cancer and, therefore, their analysis has become popular. The experimental discovery of miRNAs is cumbersome and, thus, many computational tools have been proposed. Here we assess 13 ab initio pre-miRNA detection approaches using all relevant, published, and novel data sets while judging algorithm performance based on ten intrinsic performance measures. We present an extensible framework, izMiR, which allows for the unbiased comparison of existing algorithms, adding new ones, and combining multiple approaches into ensemble methods. In an exhaustive attempt, we condense the results of millions of computations and show that no method is clearly superior; however, we provide a guideline for biomedical researchers to select a tool. Finally, we demonstrate that combining all of the methods into one ensemble approach, for the first time, allows reliable purely computational pre-miRNA detection in large eukaryotic genomes.
  • Article
    Citation - WoS: 20
    Citation - Scopus: 25
    Microrna Categorization Using Sequence Motifs and K-Mers
    (BioMed Central Ltd., 2017) Yousef, Malik; Khalifa, Waleed; Acar, İlhan Erkin; Allmer, Jens
    Background: 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.
  • Article
    Citation - WoS: 14
    Citation - Scopus: 13
    Delineating the Impact of Machine Learning Elements in Pre-Microrna Detection
    (PeerJ Inc., 2017) Saçar Demirci, Müşerref Duygu; Allmer, Jens
    Gene regulation modulates RNA expression via transcription factors. Posttranscriptional gene regulation in turn influences the amount of protein product through, for example, microRNAs (miRNAs). Experimental establishment of miRNAs and their effects is complicated and even futile when aiming to establish the entirety of miRNA target interactions. Therefore, computational approaches have been proposed. Many such tools rely on machine learning (ML) which involves example selection, feature extraction, model training, algorithm selection, and parameter optimization. Different ML algorithms have been used for model training on various example sets, more than 1,000 features describing pre-miRNAs have been proposed and different training and testing schemes have been used for model establishment. For pre-miRNA detection, negative examples cannot easily be established causing a problem for two class classification algorithms. There is also no consensus on what ML approach works best and, therefore, we set forth and established the impact of the different parts involved in ML on model performance. Furthermore, we established two new negative datasets and analyzed the impact of using them for training and testing. It was our aim to attach an order of importance to the parts involved in ML for pre-miRNA detection, but instead we found that all parts are intricately connected and their contributions cannot be easily untangled leading us to suggest that when attempting ML-based pre-miRNA detection many scenarios need to be explored.