Bias in microRNA functional enrichment analysis.

ABSTRACT:

Motivation

Many studies have investigated the differential expression of microRNAs (miRNAs) in disease states and between different treatments, tissues and developmental stages. Given a list of perturbed miRNAs, it is common to predict the shared pathways on which they act. The standard test for functional enrichment typically yields dozens of significantly enriched functional categories, many of which appear frequently in the analysis of apparently unrelated diseases and conditions.

Results

We show that the most commonly used functional enrichment test is inappropriate for the analysis of sets of genes targeted by miRNAs. The hypergeometric distribution used by the standard method consistently results in significant P-values for functional enrichment for targets of randomly

SUBMITTER: Bleazard T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4426843 | biostudies-literature | 2015 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature