Nucleic Acids Research Advance Access published online on September 28, 2009
Nucleic Acids Research, doi:10.1093/nar/gkp803
Database Issue |
TransmiR: a transcription factor–microRNA regulation database
1Department of Biomedical Informatics, Peking University School of Basic Medical Sciences and 2MOE Key Laboratory of Molecular Cardiology, Peking University, Beijing, 100191, China
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +8610 82801585; Fax: +8610 82801001; Email: cuiqinghua{at}hsc.pku.edu.cn
Received June 25, 2009. Revised September 13, 2009. Accepted September 14, 2009.
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) regulate gene expression at the posttranscriptional level and are therefore important cellular components. As is true for protein-coding genes, the transcription of miRNAs is regulated by transcription factors (TFs), an important class of gene regulators that act at the transcriptional level. The correct regulation of miRNAs by TFs is critical, and increasing evidence indicates that aberrant regulation of miRNAs by TFs can cause phenotypic variations and diseases. Therefore, a TF–miRNA regulation database would be helpful for understanding the mechanisms by which TFs regulate miRNAs and understanding their contribution to diseases. In this study, we manually surveyed approximately 5000 reports in the literature and identified 243 TF–miRNA regulatory relationships, which were supported experimentally from 86 publications. We used these data to build a TF–miRNA regulatory database (TransmiR, http://cmbi.bjmu.edu.cn/transmir), which contains 82 TFs and 100 miRNAs with 243 regulatory pairs between TFs and miRNAs. In addition, we included references to the published literature (PubMed ID) information about the organism in which the relationship was found, whether the TFs and miRNAs are involved with tumors, miRNA function annotation and miRNA-associated disease annotation. TransmiR provides a user-friendly interface by which interested parties can easily retrieve TF–miRNA regulatory pairs by searching for either a miRNA or a TF.
The authors wish it to be known that, in their opinion, the first three authors should be regarded as joint First Authors.