Predominant miRNAs in Animal-Source Foods and Bioinformatic Analysis

The recognition of microRNAs as components of animal-source foods (ASFs) with epigenetic characteristics and regulation has spurred research in an interesting direction, particularly in understanding their microRNAs (miRNAs) fraction. Thus, a constant supply of them through food intake, with equally conserved targets, may facilitate their accumulation in tissues rich in their targets. Here, we consider the potentially dominant miRNAs in animal-source foods (ASFs) documented in the literature, identified through a frequency-weighted ordinal recurrence approach. let-7d-5p, miR-101-3p, and miR-133b consistently showed dominant rankings in a product-specific manner in lean meat. In meat fat, let-7i-5p, miR-30c-5p, and miR-23a-3p were highly ranked. Among various types of meat offal, miR-145-5p, miR-92-5p, and miR-24-3p emerged as the predominant miRNAs. Similarly, in dairy products, miR-200a-3p, miR-200c-3p, miR-223-3p, miR-25-3p, miR-29a-3p, and miR-29b-3p were recurrently dominant, whereas miR-17-5p, miR-184, miR-30e-5p, and miR-92b-3p showed a comparable prevalence in seafood. Even though bioinformatic approaches suggest miRNAs from raw ASFs showed major enrichment of processes and pathways culminating in epithelial barrier integrity modulation, such putative functions tend to be equally enriched by predicted targets of the miRNAs in processed products. Product-specific highly ranked miRNAs from food categories stipulate possible preferential enrichment in contexts of cell-cell adhesion, cytoskeletal dynamics, and inflammatory control by meat (lean, fat, offal), immune homeostasis by dairy, and neural signalling by seafood, providing hypotheses for future functional studies. However, a limited understanding of their stability during gastrointestinal transit may present a more immediate limitation to their potential translational applicability.