Description:

"Cancer is a disease comprising dynamic changes in the genome that broadly affect gene expression and gene regulatory networks.  microRNAs (miRNAs) are small noncoding RNA molecules in gene regulatory networks which negatively modulate gene expression post-transcriptionally. In mammalian cells miRNA targeting of genes is nonspecific and can be influenced by genetic variation. In recent years, miRNAs have gained widespread interest since aberrant miRNA function is associated with many diseases, most notably in cancer. Here we investigate how miRNAs regulate genes in cancer in the context of genetic variation. We mine multiple high-dimensional genomic and transcriptomics datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), a free repository of omics data across several cancer types, and integrate them into an analysis pipeline. Our pipeline identifies a) entire pathways, or systems of genes, that are dysregulated in tumors by miRNAs and b) genomic variants in those pathways that appear to influence miRNA regulation of gene expression in tumors. We then corroborate these results using computational biophysics techniques to better understand their physical basis."