Dynamic miRNA-TF-mRNA circuits in mouse lung development

Abstract

Genes, transcription factors (TF), microRNAs (miRNA) are well-known to have important regulating roles in dynamic biological processes. In the last years, many studies have been devoted to the elucidation of transcriptional or post-transcriptional regulating activities of TFs or miRNAs, respectively. However, very limited attempts have been made to consider the dynamic characteristics of miRNA-TF-mRNA circuits, which are the biological network motifs considering miRNAs, TFs and genes as a whole in the complicated biological procedures like mouse lung development. Here we propose to mine miRNA-TF-mRNA circuits related to the mouse lung development by integrating TF-mRNA, miRNA-mRNA, TF-miRNA, and time-course expression data, and to further analyze the variations of these circuits in different stages of the lung development. To our best knowledge, this is the first time to take transcriptional and post-transcriptional information together to describe the mouse lung development. Our preliminary results show that miRNA-TF-mRNA circuits vary in different stages of the lung development and play different roles.