TAM: A method for enrichment and depletion analysis of a microRNA category in a list of microRNAs

Background: MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of important gene regulators. The number of identified miRNAs has been increasing dramatically in recent years. An emerging major challenge is the interpretation of the genomescale miRNA datasets, including those derived from microarray and deep-sequencing. It is interesting and important to know the common rules or patterns behind a list of miRNAs, (i.e. the deregulated miRNAs resulted from an experiment of miRNA microarray or deep-sequencing). Results: For the above purpose, this study presents a method and develops a tool (TAM) for annotations of meaningful human miRNAs categories. We first integrated miRNAs into various meaningful categories according to prior knowledge, such as miRNA family, miRNA cluster, miRNA function, miRNA associated diseases, and tissue specificity. Using TAM, given lists of miRNAs can be rapidly annotated and summarized according to the integrated miRNA categorical data. Moreover, given a list of miRNAs, TAM can b...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Ming Lu, Bing Shi, Juan Wang, Qun Cao, Qinghua Cui
• Keywords: BMCBI 2010, Genomescale MiRNA Datasets, MiRNA, MiRNA Categorical Data