Identification of miRNAs Potentially Involved in Bronchiolitis Obliterans Syndrome: A Computational Study

PLoS One. 2016 Aug 26;11(8):e0161771. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0161771. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

The pathogenesis of Bronchiolitis Obliterans Syndrome (BOS), the main clinical phenotype of chronic lung allograft dysfunction, is poorly understood. Recent studies suggest that epigenetic regulation of microRNAs might play a role in its development. In this paper we present the application of a complex computational pipeline to perform enrichment analysis of miRNAs in pathways applied to the study of BOS. The analysis considered the full set of miRNAs annotated in miRBase (version 21), and applied a sequence of filtering approaches and statistical analyses to reduce this set and to score the candidate miRNAs according to their potential involvement in BOS development. Dysregulation of two of the selected candidate miRNAs-miR-34a and miR-21 -was clearly shown in in-situ hybridization (ISH) on five explanted human BOS lungs and on a rat model of acute and chronic lung rejection, thus definitely identifying miR-34a and miR-21 as pathogenic factors in BOS and confirming the effectiveness of the computational pipeline.

MeSH terms

  • A549 Cells
  • Acute Disease
  • Algorithms
  • Animals
  • Bronchiolitis Obliterans / genetics*
  • Chronic Disease
  • Computer Simulation
  • Epigenesis, Genetic
  • Gene Expression Regulation
  • Gene Regulatory Networks
  • Graft Rejection / pathology
  • Humans
  • In Situ Hybridization
  • Lung Transplantation / adverse effects*
  • MicroRNAs / genetics*
  • Rats

Substances

  • MIRN34 microRNA, rat
  • MicroRNAs
  • mirn21 microRNA, rat

Grants and funding

This work was supported by Progetto Cariplo RIF. 2013-0943—BANDO 2013—Ricerca Medica. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.