Evaluation of hsa-mir-29c-3p impact on inhibition of triggering EMT process in gastric adenocarcinoma.

Gastric cancer is the fourth most common cancer worldwide and the second reason of cancer-related mortality.The disease — especially in its diffuse type — is poorly cohesive representing an invasive phenotype. Epithelial to Mesenchymal Transition (EMT) is known to profoundly contribute to invasion and subsequent metastasis of the disease. Therefore, EMT interruption may be an effective prospect in metastasis suppression. Several factors are involved in EMT process one of which is miRNAs, noncoding RNAs which regulate as much as 30% of the human genes. According to The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA ) report, mir-29c-3p — a well-established miRNA in Tumor suppression — is remarkably decreased in human gastric adenocarcinoma. Therefore, in this study, we have tried to provide a shortlist of genes that simultaneously 1) have positive role in EMT process 2) escape the inhibitory function of hsa-miR-29c-3p. Due to the existence of thousands of putative target genes for every single miRNA and the need to extract genes with a positive role in EMT process, different bioinformatics tools were used including miRbase, target scan, miRwalk, Quick GO, DAVID, and Aura through which we could achieve a shortlist of target genes for hsa-miR-29c-3p comprising AKT3, CDK6, COL15A1, COL1A1, COL1A2, COL3A1, COL4A1, COL4A2, GNB4, LAMC1, which most probably contribute to EMT and invasion occurrence in gastric tumor cells. The results of our study may be worthwhile to further investigation via a functional study to fully understand the underlying regulatory role of mir-29c-3p in gastric cancer metastasis.