Investigating Gene and MicroRNA Expression in Glioblastoma

Glioblastoma is the most common primary brain tumor in adults. Here we present an integrated analysis of microRNA expression and gene expression in 237 tumor tissues and 10 normal tissues. We indentified 1,236 genes, and 131 pathways significantly differentially expressed between tumor and normal tissues. We also indentified 98 differentially expressed microRNAs, 22 of which have been reported to affect glioblastoma and 73 of which to affect cancers and brain diseases. We found one experimentally validated microRNA target gene and 1,094 miRNA-target gene pairs in our datasets which were predicted by miRanda algorithm, 16 of the 661 target genes are tumor suppressor genes and 5 are oncogenes. These findings gave important clues to study of the carcinogenic process in glioblastomas.