Integrative computational mRNA–miRNA interaction analyses of the autoimmune-deregulated miRNAs and well-known Th17 differentiation regulators: An attempt to discover new potential miRNAs involved in Th17 differentiation

• We developed a network of autoimmune-deregulated miRNAs in Th17 differentiation.
• This network nominated several miRNAs with inducing role in Th17 differentiation.
• This network nominated several miRNAs with inhibitory role in Th17 differentiation.

Th17 cells are a lineage of CD4+ T helper cells in immune system which differentiate from naïve CD4+ T cells and have demonstrated to play a critical role in the pathogenesis of different autoimmune disorders. miRNAs are a novel group of non-coding RNAs which participate in post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression mostly by pairing with 3′UTR of their mRNA targets and inhibition of its translation. It has been demonstrated that miRNAs function in various cellular processes such as differentiation, proliferation, and apoptosis. By now, several signaling pathways and their downstream positive and negative regulators involve in Th17 differentiation have been discovered. Several studies have reported the aberrant miRNA expression profile in patients with autoimmune disease called autoimmune-deregulated miRNAs. Here, using integrative miRwalk database which assembles the data gathered from ten different bioinformatics databases designed to predict miRNA-target interaction, we analyzed possible targeting effect of “autoimmune-deregulated miRNAs” on prominent positive and negative regulators of Th17 differentiation. Our resulting mRNA-miRNA network simply nominated several miRNAs with strong possibility which probably may have inducing (miR-27b, miR-27a, miR-30c, miR-1, and miR-141) or inhibitory (miR-20b, miR-93, miR-20a, miR-152, miR-21, and miR-106a) role in Th17 differentiation by targeting negative or positive regulators of Th17 differentiation, respectively.