Mining Featured Patterns of MiRNA Interaction Based on Sequence and Structure Similarity

Abstract

MicroRNA (miRNA) is endogenous small non-coding RNA which plays an important role in gene expression through the post-transcriptional gene regulatory pathways. There are many literatures focusing on predicting miRNA target and exploring gene regulation network of miRNA family. We suggest, however, the study to identify the interaction between miRNAs is insufficient. This chapter presents a framework to identify relationships of miRNAs using joint entropy, to investigate the regulatory features of miRNAs. Both the sequence and secondary structure are taken into consideration to make our method more relevant from the biological viewpoint. Further, joint entropy is applied to identify correlated miRNAs, which are more desirable from the perspective of the gene regulatory network. A dataset of Drosophila melanogaster and Anopheles gambiae is used in experiment. The results demonstrate that our approach is able to not only find known miRNA interaction and identify novel patterns of miRNA regulatory network.