MicroRNA Binding Site Polymorphism in Inflammatory Genes Associated with Colorectal Cancer: Literature Review and Bioinformatics Analysis

Inflammation, among environmental risk factors, is one of the most important contributors to colorectal cancer (CRC) development. Chronic inflammatory conditions are involved in 15% of all epithelial tumors. In this way, studies revealed that the incidence of CRC in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients is up to 60 percent higher than the general population. MicroRNAs (miRNAs), small noncoding RNA molecules, have attracted excessive attention due to their fundamental role in various aspects of cellular biology such as inflammation by binding to the 3'-untranslated regions (3'-UTR) of pro and anti-inflammatory genes. On the other hand, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) reported multiple single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in inflammatory genes correlated with CRC risk. Based on multiple previous studies, SNPs at 3'-UTR can affect miRNA recognition elements (MREs) by changing in thermodynamic features and secondary structure. This effect can be categorized, based on the amount of changes, into four groups including break, decrease, create and enhance. A lot of studies have shown the effect of these polymorphisms in cancer genes especially in inflammatory genes and CRC. In this paper, we will focus on functional variants in miRNA binding sites in inflammatory genes which can modulate the risk of CRC by both investigating previous studies regarding miRSNPs in inflammatory genes associated with CRC and recruiting in silico prediction algorithms to report putative miRSNPs in 176 inflammatory genes. In our analysis, we achieved 110 miRSNPs in 3'-UTR of 67 genes that seem good targets for future researches.

Keywords:

Colorectal Cancer , Inflammation , Polymorphism , MicroRNAs