We are proud to announce the publication of our latest work on identification of miRNA involved in Bronchiolitis Obliterans Syndrome.
Read the open-access, full-text article here:
http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0161771
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Identification of miRNAs Potentially Involved in Bronchiolitis Obliterans Syndrome: A Computational Study
Abstract:
The pathogenesis of Bronchiolitis Obliterans Syndrome (BOS), the main clinical phenotype of chronic lung allograft dysfunction, is poorly understood. Recent studies suggest that epigenetic regulation of microRNAs might play a role in its development. In this paper we present the application of a complex computational pipeline to perform enrichment analysis of miRNAs in pathways applied to the study of BOS. The analysis considered the full set of miRNAs annotated in miRBase (version 21), and applied a sequence of filtering approaches and statistical analyses to reduce this set and to score the candidate miRNAs according to their potential involvement in BOS development. Dysregulation of two of the selected candidate miRNAs–miR-34aand miR-21 –was clearly shown in in-situ hybridization (ISH) on five explanted human BOS lungs and on a rat model of acute and chronic lung rejection, thus definitely identifying miR-34a and miR-21 as pathogenic factors in BOS and confirming the effectiveness of the computational pipeline.