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Predicting Interactions between microRNAs and mRNA

Status: selected

Praktikum (Bachelor/Master)

Field: Gene/MicroRNA expression/regulation

 

Advisors: Rehberg, Engelmann

 

Courses Required: Practical Bioinformatics I, good R programming skills

 

Objective: microRNAs (miRNAs) are short RNAs (~21-24 nt) which can bind to other mRNAs and regulate their abundances and thus affect various biological processes. Modern high-throughput technologies, allow to detect the paired expression of many RNAs and miRNAs. For paired expression profiles it was shown that by using a least angle regression approach the gene expression could be reconstructed from the miRNA expression and new interactions which can be associated with cancer [1] discovered. In this project, the approach described in [1] should be applied on newer and larger miRNA-mRNA datasets and the results compared to the previous outcomes.

 

First-Steps: Get familiar with the data preprocessing steps and interaction modeling with regression algorithms.

 

Questions: Can the previous results be confirmed on new data? What are the regulation targets of the miRNAs in these datasets?

 

Start Reading:

[1] "A Least Angle Regression Model for the Prediction of Canonical and Non-Canonical miRNA-mRNA Interactions" Julia C. Engelmann, Rainer Spang (2012) PLoS ONE; journals.plos.org/plosone/article

  1. STARTSEITE UR