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Updated: Jun 6, 2026

Describing a Transcription Factor Dependent Regulation of the MicroRNA Transcriptome
Published on: June 15, 2016
Combinatorial regulation of transcription factors and microRNAs
Naifang Su1, Yufu Wang, Minping Qian
1LMAM, School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
Background:
Gene regulation is a key factor in gaining a full understanding of molecular biology. Cis-regulatory modules (CRMs), consisting of multiple transcription factor binding sites, have been confirmed as the main regulators in gene expression. In recent years, a novel regulator known as microRNA (miRNA) has been found to play an important role in gene regulation. Meanwhile, transcription factor and microRNA co-regulation has been widely identified. Thus, the relationships between CRMs and microRNAs have generated interest among biologists.
Results:
We constructed new combinatorial regulatory modules based on CRMs and miRNAs. By analyzing their effect on gene expression profiles, we found that genes targeted by both CRMs and miRNAs express in a significantly similar way. Furthermore, we constructed a regulatory network composed of CRMs, miRNAs, and their target genes. Investigating its structure, we found that the feed forward loop is a significant network motif, which plays an important role in gene regulation. In addition, we further analyzed the effect of miRNAs in embryonic cells, and we found that mir-154, as well as some other miRNAs, have significant co-regulation effect with CRMs in embryonic development.
Conclusions:
Based on the co-regulation of CRMs and miRNAs, we constructed a novel combinatorial regulatory network which was found to play an important role in gene regulation, particularly during embryonic development.
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