ChemiRs: a web application for microRNAs and chemicals

Area of Science:

• Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
• Environmental Health
• Bioinformatics

Background:

• MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are crucial non-coding RNAs regulating cellular functions across species.
• Over 2500 human miRNAs are known, yet understanding their links to environmental chemicals and health impacts remains limited.
• Environmental chemicals can disrupt biological pathways, potentially leading to disease.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a reliable online web server, ChemiRs, for predicting interactions among miRNAs, environmental chemicals, and biological pathways.
• To provide a comprehensive resource for investigating the relationships between chemical exposures, miRNA activity, and human health.

Main Methods:

• Manually retrieved associations between miRNAs and chemicals from biomedical literature.
• Integrated curated pathway information from KEGG and REACTOME databases.
• Utilized Gene Ontology (GO) data from GOOSE for comprehensive annotation.

Main Results:

• Developed ChemiRs, an online web server predicting interactions among miRNAs, chemicals, and pathways.
• The database compares gene lists affected by chemicals and miRNAs, incorporating pathways to identify potential interactions.
• ChemiRs includes data on miRNAs, diseases, MeSH terms, chemicals, genes, pathways, and PubMed IDs, with links to miRBase and HGNC.

Conclusions:

• ChemiRs facilitates the understanding of pathogenesis related to chemical components by analyzing miRNA-chemical associations.
• The user-friendly web application allows easy integration and export of query results in PDF format.
• ChemiRs is freely accessible to the public at http://omics.biol.ntnu.edu.tw/ChemiRs for research and discovery.