Discovery of functional miRNA–mRNA regulatory modules with computational methods

The identification of miRNAs and their target mRNAs and the construction of their regulatory networks may give new insights into biological procedures. This study proposes a computational method to discover the functional miRNA–mRNA regulatory modules (FMRMs), that is, groups of miRNAs and their target mRNAs that are believed to participate cooperatively in post-transcriptional gene regulation under specific conditions. The proposed method identifies negatively regulated patterns of miRNAs and mRNAs which associate with cancer and normal conditions, respectively, in a prostate cancer data set. GO and the literature also suggest that they may relate with prostate cancer. It can potentially identify the biologically relevant chains of ‘miRNA →→ target gene →→ condition’.