The human microRNA disease database (HMDD)

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of small non-coding RNAs (~22 nt), which normally function as negative regulators of target mRNA expression at the posttranscriptional level by binding to the 3’UTR of target mRNAs through base pairing, resulting in target mRNAs cleavage or translation inhibition(Ambros 2004; Bartel 2004; Meister and Tuschl 2004). There are increasing evidences that have revealed that miRNAs play critical roles in many key biological processes, such as cell growth, tissue differentiation, cell proliferation, embryonic development, cell proliferation, and apoptosis(Esquela-Kerscher and Slack 2006). As such, the mutation of miRNAs, the dysfunction of miRNA biogenesis and the dysregulation of miRNAs and their targets may result to various diseases, such as cancers(Calin and Croce 2006; Esquela-Kerscher and Slack 2006), cardiovascular disease(Latronico et al. 2007; van Rooij and Olson 2007), schizophrenia(Hansen, et al. 2007; Perkins et al. 2007), renal function disorders(Williams 2007), Tourette's syndrome(Esau and Monia 2007), psoriasis(Sonkoly et al. 2007), primary muscular disorders(Eisenberg et al. 2007), Fragile-X mental retardation syndrome(Fiore and Schratt 2007), Polycythemia vera(Bruchova et al. 2007), diabetes(Williams 2007), chronic hepatitis(Murakami et al. 2006), AIDS(Hariharan etal. 2005), and obesity(Weiler et al. 2006). These studies have produced a large number of miRNA-disease associations and shown that the mechanisms of miRNAs implicated in diseases are very complex. Therefore, a large-scale analysis and integrating of these miRNA-disease associations at a system level will offer a platform to dissect the mechanisms of miRNAs in disease, although the current miRNA-disease associations are far from complete.

Here, we manually retrieved the associations of miRNA and disease from literatures. We built a human miRNA disease database (HMDD), which contains miRNA names, disease names, dysfunction evidences, and the literature PubMed ID. We connect each miRNA to miRBase(Griffiths-Jones 2004) for detailed genome annotations. The tissue expression pictures of some miRNAs in 40 tissues are also provided. The whole dataset in HMDD are available when query.


Citation:
Lu M, Zhang Q, Deng M, Miao J, Guo Y, et al. (2008) An Analysis of Human MicroRNA and Disease Associations. PLoS ONE 3(10): e3420. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0003420.

If you have any questions, comments, or advices, please send emails to Mr. Ming Lu at cmbi#bjmu.edu.cn, or Dr. Qinghua Cui at cuiqinghua#bjmu.edu.cn.

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Last update: 2008-10-17