2.3. Searching for Potential Target Genes of miR-1 in NPC Tissues

miRWalk is an integrative database that includes the information of miRNA target genes in humans, mice, and other species and integrates the data from miRBridge, miRDB, miRanda, TargetScan, and other databases.

In this study, 12 databases, including miRWalk, miRDB, miRBridge, and other databases in miRWalk2.0, were applied to obtain the target genes of miR-1. Meanwhile, differentially expressed genes (DEG) in the mRNA datasets of NPC derived from the public databases were also screened using the limma package of the R x64 3.6.2 software. Genes with a |log2 (fold change)| of >1 and P < 0.05 were considered DEGs. Intersection was then obtained for all upregulated DEGs, with genes present in at least two sets as the candidate target genes. Finally, the selected upregulated DEGs were intersected with the genes predicted by miRWalk2.0 to obtain target genes for downstream analysis.