Deregulation of microRNAs in oral squamous cell carcinoma, a bioinformatics analysis

Backgrounds and aims: Oral Squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) is the most abundant oral cancer affecting the mouth and tongue. The present study aims to identify the deregulated miRNAs possibly critical in the OSCC progression and analyze the miRNAs' involvement in the OSCC pathogenesis. Method: A dataset of OSCC with a platform of Affymetrix arrays for microRNA was retrieved from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO). All significantly deregulated miRNAs (DE-miRs) of the OSCC tumor tissue samples vs healthy controls were identified using the GEO2R Tool and were fed as an input to the miEAATool to predict the target genes of the DE-miRs available in the miRTarBase database. We used the miEAA database and the TAM Tool for Gene Ontology, KEGG pathway, and disease enrichment analysis of the DE-miRs. The miRNA-TF-target gene network was constructed and analyzed to identify the essential hub-bottleneck network's microRNAs and genes using the Cytoscape 3. Result: We found that 71 miRNAs were significantly upregulated (logFC > 0.5, Pvalue < 0.05) and 43 miRNAs were down-regulated (logFC <-0.5, Pvalue < 0.05). miRNA-TF-target gene network contained 465 nodes, 877 edges, and 17 hub-bottleneck miRNAs and genes. The disease identified as associated with the DE-miRs was mainly linked to two categories: cancer and infection. Conclusion: In the present study, miR-101, miR-99a, and NACC1 were identified as critical hubs and bottlenecks participating in various biological processes that their deregulation probably leads to an increase in the OSCC progression. NACC1 could play an essential role in OSCC progression through its interaction with many miRs.