Computational Approach for Evaluation of Possible Role of miR-342-3p in Patients with Gastric Carcinoma

Gastric cancer (GC) is the most common malignancy and the second cause of cancer deathworldwide which is often diagnosed in advanced stages. GC is a multistep disease due toderegulation of oncogenic pathways. It is reported that Helicobacter pylori infectionassociated with chronic inflammation and can lead to GC. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a largeclass of short non-coding RNAs (containing about 22 nucleotides) which have been shown toregulate oncogenes, tumor suppressors and a number of cancer-related genes. Therefore,miRNAs could be utilized as a prognostic biomarker and also therapeutic targets fortreatment strategy. The role of miR-342-3p has been defined in cervical, colorectal, breastcancers, and hepatocellular carcinoma. This study aimed to expand current knowledge ofprobable molecular function of miR-342-3p in patients with GC. Predicted and validatedtargets of miR-342-3p were obtained from miRwalk and miRTarBase databases respectively.The expression patterns of targetable genes in normal stomach and gastrointestinal tumorwere investigated by UniGene database. Finally, gastric cancer specific targetome wereclassified into molecular pathways by DAVID database. It is predicted that critical mRNAs inangiogenesis pathway (TGFα, EGFR, Grb2, SOS, Raf, MEK, ERK, cJun, Ets1, VEGEF andMMPs) are targeted by miR-342-3p. Interestingly, our data showed that miR-342-3p inhibitssome well-known oncogenes such as JAK, SHP2, STAT, GRB, SOS, and BclXL in JAKSTATpathway which is one of the inflammation related signal pathway. The exact functionof miR-342-3p has not been already reported. According to our data, miR-342-3p acts as atumor suppressor molecule and may be involved in GC carcinogenesis by altering regulationof angiogenesis and some gastric cancer related pathway. In addition, miR-342-3p may beuseful for therapeutic purposes in future. To sum it up, miR-342-3p might be an usefulprognostic biomarker in GC patients.

Keywords:

Gastric Cancer (GC) , MiR-342-3p , Helicobacter Pylori , Prognosis , SignalingPathway