Disease-related miRNA mutations are associated with mature miRNA secondary structure changes.

ABSTRACT: MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are ubiquitous short RNAs regulating gene expression in many organisms, including humans. How the secondary structure (SS) of a mature miRNA affects its regulatory function remains an open question. Here, we investigate this question through computational SS predictions of miRNA point mutants. We explore the mutational neighborhoods of miRNAs with association to human diseases, including cancer. We focus on possible SS changes independent of target-site complementarity by leaving the seed region unchanged. We formulate metrics of the SS differences between such mutants and their wild types (WTs) and test whether disease-associated mutations tend to differ from others in terms of these metrics by comparing our results with the miRNASNP-v3 database. We find that disease-re

SUBMITTER: Novev JK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12709415 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature