miRCancer : a microRNA-Cancer Association Database and Toolkit Based on Text Mining

Abstract

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of single-stranded small non-coding RNAs. Study of miRNAs has been a fast growing field since the first miRNA was discovered in 1993. Many findings indicate that miRNA plays an important role in regulating crucial processes in gene development. In this research, we designed and implemented a framework called miRCancer, which is the first comprehensive database for miRNA expression profiles in human cancers based on experimental results. miRCancer also includes an integrated microRNA sequence analysis toolkit to help researchers discover possible relationships and functionalities of miRNAs. Text mining was used to automatically extract miRNA expression information from online electronic literatures. A new coding system, EICD-O, was introduced to annotate miRNA expressions in cancers.