Conserved Expression Patterns Predict microRNA Targets
Figure 1
miRNA/mRNA pairs with strong conserved negative correlation coefficients overlap with miRBase and TargetScan predictions.
The expression levels of 809,640 miRNA/mRNA pairs were compared across 35 human tissues and a correlation coefficient (r) for each pair was calculated. Pairs with a negative r (inverse correlation) were binned into 5 groups. The first bin contained pairs for which r was between 0 and −0.1 (poor negative correlation) and the last contained pairs for which r was below −0.4 (strong negative correlation). Because our analysis identified only one CNC pair with an r below −0.5, no bin was created for this category. For each bin, the relative overlap between these pairs and putative miRNA/target-mRNA pairs predicted by (A) TargetScan and (B) miRBase was calculated. The degree of overlap between pairs in each bin and pairs from the two databases are represented by vertical bars. The number of pairs in each bin and their percentage of the total number of pairs are shown above these bars. The threshold for significant overlaps (p-value<0.05) is represented by a horizontal dotted line. For example, pairs with negative correlation coefficients between −0.3 and −0.4 show a significant overlap with predictions from TargetScan but not with predictions from miRBase. A similar analysis was conducted in (C) and (D) except that conserved correlation scores between human and mouse were calculated. Conserved negative correlation scores provided a higher overlap with existing predictions from miRBase and TargetScan.