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Review
. 2018 Mar;34(3):165-167.
doi: 10.1016/j.tig.2017.12.015. Epub 2018 Jan 18.

Big Strides in Cellular MicroRNA Expression

Marc K Halushka  1 , Bastian Fromm  2 , Kevin J Peterson  3 , Matthew N McCall  4
Affiliations
Review

Big Strides in Cellular MicroRNA Expression

Marc K Halushka et al. Trends Genet. 2018 Mar.

Abstract

A lack of knowledge of the cellular origin of miRNAs has greatly confounded functional and biomarkers studies. Recently, three studies characterized miRNA expression patterns across >78 human cell types. These combined data expand our knowledge of miRNA expression localization and confirm that many miRNAs show cell type-specific expression patterns.

Keywords: RNA-seq; cell expression; microRNA.

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Figures

Figure
Figure
Robust cell-specific miRNA expression data can be used to improve the analysis of tissue miRNA expression data. This hypothetical example shows how one could use such data to estimate the composition of 5 tissue samples. Specifically, the input data is computationally compared to the cell-specific miRNA expression distributions of constitutive cell types to estimate the cellular composition of each tissue sample. Such deconvolution methods rely on a vast amount of cell-specific expression data to assess cell-specificity. Adjusting for changes in tissue composition is important when comparing normal and diseased tissues where the composition, due to inflammation or fibrosis, is altered.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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    1. McCall MN, et al. MicroRNA profiling of diverse endothelial cell types. BMC Med Genomics. 2011;4:78. - PMC - PubMed
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    1. de Rie D, et al. An integrated expression atlas of miRNAs and their promoters in human and mouse. Nat Biotechnol. 2017;35(9):872–878. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Juzenas S, et al. A comprehensive, cell specific microRNA catalogue of human peripheral blood. Nucleic Acids Res. 2017;45(16):9290–9301. - PMC - PubMed

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