Publication

Abstract : Identification of micro RNAs (miRNAs) as a biomarker to diagnose and treat auto immune diseases is a great challenge in the era of post genomics and the ability to apply an accurate computational approach leads to the initiation of discovering novel biomarkers. Initially we have identified the list of genes from a database which contain a catalog of Genome Wide Association Study (GWAS) and then we have identified the validated miRNAs from miRTarBase. Finally we have found the connectivity map between the gene and validated miRNA target from miRmap and the binding energies were analyzed for each pair (gene-miRNA). We have applied the above mentioned approach to Psoriasis. In case of Psoriasis, 15 distinct genes are present in GWAS and among them; NOS2, IL13, TNFAIP3 and TSC1 contain validated miRNAs in miRTarBase. Finally, binding energies were analyzed for the obtained miRNAs and it has been found that the binding of hsa-miR-26a-5p with the mRNA of NOS2 is more stable than the binding of other miRNAs with their respective genes on the basis of binding energy and hence there is a maximum probability for the utilization of hsa-miR-26a-5p as a biomarker for Psoriasis. At present we have applied this model for Psoriasis and in future we will be applying this model to other auto immune diseases and the above mentioned methodology can also be applied to predict miRNA based biomarkers in a disease.