Endogeneous mRNA level fluctuations in various brain tumor cells

Background: microRNAs (miRNAs) are approximately 21 nucleotide non-coding transcripts capable of regulating gene expression. The most widely studied mechanism of regulation involves binding of the miRNA to a target mRNA, usually in its 3 untranslated region (UTR). As a result, translation of the target mRNA is inhibited and sometimes the mRNA itself can be de-stabilized. The inhibitory effects of miRNAs have been linked to many diverse cellular processes including malignant proliferation and apoptosis, development and differentiation, metabolic processes and neural plasticity. We asked whether endogenous fluctuations in a set of mRNA and miRNA profiles contain correlated changes that are statistically distinguishable from the many other fluctuations in the data set.

12

Liu T, Papagiannakopoulos T, Puskar K, Qi S, Santiago F, Clay W, Lao K, Lee Y, Nelson SF, Kornblum HI, Doyle F, Petzold L, Shraiman B, Kosik KS