Identification of novel miRNAs involved in cancer progression and metastasis in clear cell renal cell carcinoma

Cancer cells alter the metabolic pathways that are feasible for their growth and development. Clear cell renal cell carcinoma, which is characterized by loss or mutation of VHL gene, which promotes cell invasiveness. The global incidence rate of kidney cancer was 319,016 in 2020. MicroRNAs are 21–23nt long, conserved and non-coding molecules, involved in gene expression regulation by RNA silencing and post-transcriptional gene regulation. It has been reported that microRNA dysregulation is associated with clear cell renal cell carcinoma along with various human cancers such as breast cancer, colorectal cancer, ovarian cancer and hepatocellular carcinoma. However, the aim of this study was to identify microRNAs that are differentially expressed between normal kidney tissue and clear cell renal cell carcinoma samples. For this research, a publicly available microRNA dataset was retrieved from ArrayExpress, followed by preprocessing. Mapping, identification of known and novel microRNAs, and quantification were executed using miRDeep2 to perform differential expression analysis using DESeq R/Bioconductor package. Target identification and functional enrichment analysis were conducted using GeneCodis4. In total 2656 microRNAs were found to be differentially expressed, among which upregulated and downregulated microRNAs were 229 and 302 respectively. This study identifies five microRNAs that were significantly related to clear cell renal cell carcinoma, along with a novel set of five microRNAs that have not been investigated previously for clear cell renal cell carcinoma.