Mining the 3′UTR of Autism-implicated Genes for SNPs Perturbing MicroRNA Regulation

作     者：Varadharajan Vaishnavi Mayakannan Manikandan Arasambattu Kannan Munirajan 

作者机构：Department of Genetics Dr. ALM PG Institute of Basic Medical Sciences University of Madras 

出 版 物：《Genomics, Proteomics & Bioinformatics》 (基因组蛋白质组与生物信息学报（英文版）)

年 卷 期：2014年第12卷第2期

页      面：92-104页

核心收录：

学科分类：1002[医学-临床医学] 100201[医学-内科学(含：心血管病、血液病、呼吸系病、消化系病、内分泌与代谢病、肾病、风湿病、传染病)] 10[医学] 

基　　金：supported by a grant from the Depart-ment of Biotechnology,New Delhi,India to AKM(Grant No.BT/PR10023/AGR/36/27/2007) supported by a research fellowship from the Council of Scientific and Indus-trial Research,New Delhi 

主　　题：Autism spectrum disorder MicroRNA Single nucleotide polymorphism 30UTR-SNP Gene regulation 

摘      要：Autism spectrum disorder（ASD） refers to a group of childhood neurodevelopmental disorders with polygenic etiology. The expression of many genes implicated in ASD is tightly regulated by various factors including microRNAs（miRNAs）, a class of noncoding RNAs 22 nucleotides in length that function to suppress translation by pairing with ‘miRNA recognition elements’（MREs） present in the 30untranslated region（30UTR） of target mRNAs. This emphasizes the role played by miRNAs in regulating neurogenesis, brain development and differentiation and hence any perturbations in this regulatory mechanism might affect these processes as well. Recently, single nucleotide polymorphisms（SNPs） present within 30UTRs of mRNAs have been shown to modulate existing MREs or even create new MREs. Therefore, we hypothesized that SNPs perturbing miRNA-mediated gene regulation might lead to aberrant expression of autism-implicated genes, thus resulting in disease predisposition or pathogenesis in at least a subpopulation of ASD individuals. We developed a systematic computational pipeline that integrates data from well-established databases. By following a stringent selection criterion, we identified 9 MRE-modulating SNPs and another 12 MRE-creating SNPs in the 30UTR of autism-implicated genes. These high-confidence candidate SNPs may play roles in ASD and hence would be valuable for further functional validation.