TUMIR: an experimentally supported database of microRNA deregulation in various cancers.

Background: MicroRNAs were found to play an important role in cancers and several literatures exist to describe the relationship between microRNA and cancer, but the expression pattern was still faintly. There is a need for a comprehensive collection and summary of the interactions under experimental support.

Description: TUMIR (http://www.ncrnalab.com/TUMIR/), a manually extracted database of experimentally supported microRNA-cancer relationship, aims at providing a large, high-quality, validated comprehensive resource of microRNA deregulation in various cancers. The current version includes a systematic literature search to May-1-2012 using PubMed database, contains data extracted from 205 literatures and 1163 entries describing a regulatory interaction between human microRNAs and cancers. Each entry in the database contains the details of microRNA name, the disease name, case number, control number, p value, the experimentally validated targets, sample type, and a brief description of patients' clinic pathologic parameters mentioned in the same paper. The website has several extensive external links to the related websites and any requests can be made by emailing to tumir_pumc@163.com.

Conclusion: TUMIR is an open access website and will be an accurate clue for the researchers who are interested in better understanding the relationship between miRNAs and cancer.