Discovery of inflammatory bowel disease-associated miRNAs using a novel bipartite clustering approach

Background Multidimensional data mining from an integrated environment of different data sources is frequently performed in computational system biology. The molecular mechanism from the analysis of a complex network of gene-miRNA can aid to diagnosis and treatment of associated diseases. Methods In this work, we mainly focus on finding inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) associated microRNAs (miRNAs) by biclustering the miRNA-target interactions aided by known IBD risk genes and their associated miRNAs collected from several sources. We rank different miRNAs by attributing to the dataset size and connectivity of IBD associated genes in the miRNA regulatory modules from biclusters. We search the association of some top-ranking miRNAs to IBD related diseases. We also search the network of discovered miRNAs to different diseases and evaluate the similarity of those diseases to IBD. Results According to different literature, our results show the significance of top-ranking miRNA to IBD or related diseases. The ratio analysis supports our ranking method where the top 20 miRNA has approximately tenfold attachment to IBD genes. From disease-associated miRNA network analysis we found that 71% of different diseases attached to those miRNAs show more than 0.75 similarity scores to IBD. Conclusion We successfully identify some miRNAs related to IBD where the scoring formula and disease-associated network analysis show the significance of our method. This method can be a promising approach for isolating miRNAs for similar types of diseases.