• Detection of the Common MicroRNAs Associated with Breast Brain Metastasis: A Bioinformatics Survey
  • Zahra Torki,1,* Mohammad Reza Alivand,2
    1. Department of Medical Genetics, Faculty of Medicine, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Tabriz, Iran.
    2. Department of Medical Genetics, Faculty of Medicine, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Tabriz, Iran.


  • Introduction: Breast brain metastasis rates is in a rise due to higher survival rates of the patients. It is necessary to obtain more detailed information on the impacts of deregulations in the expression of microRNAs (miRs) and mRNAs with regard to the etiology of breast brain metastasis since a metastatic process necessitates a complicated setting such as a suitable niche.
  • Methods: Aiming to detect the important molecular pathways and important miRs in the breast brain metastasis, we searched for publically available microarray studies on this subject from the Gene Expression Omnibus database (GEO) data base. Two miR data sets (GSE134108 and GSE37407) as well as one mRNA data set (GSE52604) were selected. GEO2R, an interactive web tool, was used to compare two group of samples in each GEO series in order to discover the differentially expressed miRs (DEMs) and the differentially expressed genes (DEGs). The list of common up regulated miRs was detected, then the list of target genes of theses common miRs that were also consistent with downexpressed DEGs, the important pathways and protein-protein interactions (PPI) were detected.
  • Results: The miRs data sets consisted of GSE134108 on the subject of brain metastasis-related miRs in the serum samples of patients with advanced breast cancer, and GSE37407 that was miR expression profiling from tissue samples and the gene expression profiling study with GSE52604 used tissue samples. In total, we detected 4 shared DEMs (hsa-miR-200a/b/c family and has-miR-141) and 131 common DEGs. The most enriched term for the DEGs included Focal Adhesion in pathway analysis, head development in biological processes analysis and a PPI network was provided as well.
  • Conclusion: In conclusion, members of miRs-200 family (miR-200a/b/c) as well as miR-141 potentiate advanced breast cancer patients for developing a metastasis of cancer cells into the brain tissue, and these miRs might represent biomarkers for this process.
  • Keywords: Breast cancer, Brain Metastasis, Bioinformatics, microarray, microRNA