Identification of Microrna-21 as a Pro-Invasive Taget in Urothelial Cell Carninoma

MiRNAs are short non-coding endogenous RNA molecules that play substantial roles in human development and cell lineage decisions. It has been shown to regulate gene expression by controlling messenger RNA (mRNA) translation efficiency. There are emerging evidences suggesting that miRNA plays a critical role in cancer initiation and progression, acting either as tumor suppressors or oncogenes. This study is aimed at identifying mRNA expression patterns associated with the invasiveness of Urothelial Cell Carcinoma (UCC) cell lines and functional targeting of specific miRNAs that potentially regulate these target genes. Microarray-based global gene expression profiling of EJ28 (invasive) and RT112 (non-invasive) cells was performed to identify differentially regulated genes (P<0.01). Loess normalization using non-differentially expressed genes was performed by a rank invariant selection method to normalize the logarithmic expression ratios. Non-parametric Wilcoxon rank-sum test was used to identify top differentially expressed genes. Gene ontology was assigned to the top dysregulated genes using GeneDecks V3 online software (p