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The 11 th International Workshop on KSHV & Related Agents, Birmingham, UK
Poster Session Abstract P10
ANALYSIS METHODS FOR THE RELIABLE PREDICTION OF VIRUS AND HOST
MIRNA EXPRESSION FROM THE AGILENT MIRNA MICROARRAY
Eve Coulter, Dan Frampton, Paul Kellam
MRC Centre for Medical Molecular Virology, Department of Infection, UCL, 46 Cleveland
Street, London, W1T 4JF
Abstract
MicroRNAs play an important role in the down-regulation of gene expression by blocking
translation of their mRNA targets. Hundreds of miRNAs have been identified within the
human genome, many of which are predicted to be involved in the regulation of major
cellular processes such as cell development and apoptosis. It is thought their abnormal
expression may contribute to cancer development and proliferation. In addition, miRNAs
have been shown to be present in every herpesvirus examined to date suggesting they
play a similar role in viral gene regulation.
The development of suitable miRNA array technology allows us to detect the presence or
absence of both human and viral miRNAs and to use miRNA profiles to differentiate
between virus-infected and non-infected cell types. However, there is some uncertainty
over the design of reliable probes for viral miRNAs, with several different probes being
used to measure the level expression of a given miRNA. We have used the Agilent miR
array platform and a panel of herpesvirus positive B-cell lymphomas to develop an
accurate data analysis method which discards unreliable probes and show it is better able
to discriminate between KSHV- and EBV-infected B-cell tumour cell lines than the
standard Agilent method. Statistical validation was performed using ROC analysis of a
large dataset of B cell tumour cell line miRNA arrays and predicted differentially
expressed miRNAs confirmed by real time PCR.
Presenting author Email: d.frampton@ucl.ac.uk
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