2.5. miRNA-Based Target Prediction and Pathway Enrichment Analysis of Target Genes

We explored target genes and potential altered molecular pathways for the SDE miRNAs identified in the statistical analysis.

The miRTarbase database was used to identify experimentally validated interactions throughout the hypergeometric distribution approach. Statistically significant miRNA gene-targets (enriched target genes) were found at p-value < 0.05 adjusted by FDR using Benjamin–Hochberg correction and a minimum of two interactions.

The g:Profiler web-based server was used to conduct a functional enrichment analysis on the list of significantly enriched gene targets [16]. We choose the KEGG (Kyoto Encyclopaedia of Genes and Genomes) database to retrieve statistically significantly enriched pathways at the adjusted p-value < 0.05. The Gene Ontology (GO) annotation database was used as a source of information for the enriched target genes identified by the SDE miRNA uniquely found in each comparison.