Towards a Flexible and Portable Workflow for Analyzing miRNA-Seq Neuropsychiatric Data: An Initial Replicability Assessment

In the last decade, miRNAs have attracted noticeable interest as potential biomarkers of neuropsychiatric conditions. However, a standard methodology for miRNA-Seq analysis does not yet exist, raising concerns about the reproducibility of the in-silico results and limiting their usefulness. This situation motivated us to design a miRNA-Seq pipeline specialized in the analysis of neuropsychiatric data, aiming to integrate the results of several bioinformatics tools in a highly reproducible workflow. In this study, we performed an initial test of the usefulness of our new pipeline, named myBrain-Seq, by reanalyzing four recent miRNA-Seq studies of neuropsychiatric conditions. We then compared the myBrain-Seq results with the original results and with an additional reanalysis done with another pipeline in order to make an estimation of the overall replicability. We found one of the three myBrain-Seq methodologies to be the one with best replicability, although the heterogeneity of the results and the absence of an experimental validation limits our conclusions. Further work is required to assess myBrain-Seq’ performance using a bigger dataset of studies with experimental validation data available.