Relationship between microRNA genes incidence and cancer-associated genomic regions in canine tumors: a comprehensive bioinformatics study

The role of microRNAs (miRNAs) in human cancer biology has been confirmed on a genome-wide scale through the high incidence of these genes in cancer-associated regions. We analyzed the association between canine miRNA genes and cancer-associated regions (deleted and amplified regions) using previously published array of comparative genomic hybridization data on 268 canine cancer samples-comprising osteosarcoma, breast cancer, leukemia, and colorectal cancer. We also assessed this relationship apropos the incidence of miRNA genes in the CpG islands of the canine genome assembly. The association was evaluated using the mixed-effects Poisson regression analysis. Our analyses revealed that 135 miRNA genes were exactly located in the aberrated regions: 77 (57 %) in the loss and 58 (43 %) in amplified regions. Our findings indicated that the miRNA genes were located more frequently in the deleted regions as well as in the CpG islands than in all other regions. Additionally, with the exception of leukemia, the amplified regions significantly contained higher numbers of miRNA genes than did all the other regions.