Prediction of Site Directed miRNAs as Key Players of Transcriptional Regulators Against Influenza C Virus Infection Through Computational Approaches

Abstract

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNAs that play critical roles in gene expression, cell differentiation, and immunity against viral infections. In this study, we have used the computational tools, RNA22, RNAhybrid, and miRanda, to predict the microRNA-mRNA binding sites to find the putative microRNAs playing role in the host response to influenza C virus infection. This computational research screened the following four miRNAs: hsa-mir-3155a, hsa-mir-6796-5p, hsa-mir-3194-3p and hsa-mir-4673, which were further investigated for binding site prediction to the influenza C genome. Moreover, multiple sites in protein-coding region (HEF, CM2, M1-M2, NP, NS1- NS2, NSF, P3, PB1 and PB2) were predicted by RNA22, RNAhybrid and miRanda. Furthermore, 3D structures of all miRNAs and HEF were predicted and checked for their binding potential through molecular docking analysis. The comparative results showed that among all proteins, HEF is higher in prevalence throughout the analysis as a potential (human-derived) microRNAs target. The target-site conservation results showed that core nucleotide sequence in three different strains is responsible for potential miRNA binding to different viral strains. Further steps to use these microRNAs may lead to new therapeutic insights on fighting influenza virus infection.

MicroRNAs Regulate Tumorigenesis by Downregulating SOCS3 Expression: An In silico Approach

“…A similar research employed the standard RNA22 input parameters, which predicted 242 miRNAs suggesting possible binding sites against the influenza C virus genome. 29 In this study, RNA22 predicted the binding sites of 503 miRNAs against SOCS3. The results were filtered based on the P -value criteria of < .05 which yielded 238 significant alignments.…”

“…Minimum number of paired-up bases in heteroduplex was kept at 10 while the maximum folding energy was kept at −12 kcal/mol. 29 The nucleotide sequence of SOCS3 was extracted from NCBI (accession: NG_016851). The sequences of shortlisted miRNAs were retrieved from miRBase database (v22; https://www.mirbase.org/ ).…”