2.7 Construction the CeRNA Network

The DEL-associated ceRNA networks were constructed based on the competing endogenous RNA (ceRNA) hypothesis. The target miRNAs of lncRNAs were predicted based on the results of using miRanda (Enright et al., 2003), and the lncRNAs and their paired miRNAs exhibiting negatively correlated expressions were considered as lncRNA-miRNA pairs. By coexpression theory, the expressive correlation between DELs and DEGs was evaluated using the Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC), pairs with PCC > 0.95 were selected as lncRNA-mRNA pairs. The TargetScan (Agarwal et al., 2015), miRanda (Enright et al., 2003), and RNAhybrid (Rehmsmeier et al., 2004) databases were used to predict the biological targets of DEmiRNAs, the overlapping results between the targets of DEmiRNAs and DEGs were selected as miRNA-mRNA pairs. The ceRNA networks were visualized with DELs, DEmiRNAs and DEGs by using Cytoscape (version 3.8.2).