miEAA

miEAA performs enrichment analysis of microRNAs to identify statistically significant associations between miRNAs and biological categories such as pathways, diseases, organs, and target genes.

Key Features:

• Statistical Analysis: Implements over-representation analysis and miRNA set enrichment analysis analogous to Gene Set Enrichment Analysis to detect significant associations between miRNAs and annotation categories.
• Extensive miRNA Sets: Contains over 14,000 miRNA sets covering pathways, diseases, organs, and target genes for both miRNA precursors and mature miRNAs.
• Data Conversion Tools: Provides converters between different miRBase versions and converters from miRNA names to precursor names.
• Rich Functional Annotations: Integrates a data warehouse aggregating 19 miRNA repositories across 10 organisms and 139,399 functional categories, including annotations for cellular contexts, isomiRs, and high-confidence miRNAs.
• Aggregated Results Visualization: Represents aggregated enrichment results using Upset plots to show intersections among enriched terms.
• Validation and Application: Has been validated on miRNA sets affected in lung adenocarcinomas and applied to ageing-related datasets.

Scientific Applications:

• Functional enrichment: Extracts functional insights from complex miRNA lists to interpret regulatory roles in biological processes and diseases.
• Oncology: Identifies miRNA associations relevant to cancer studies, including analyses of lung adenocarcinoma miRNA sets.
• Developmental biology: Supports investigation of miRNA roles in developmental processes through enrichment-based annotation.
• Systems biology: Enables systems-level analyses of miRNA-mediated regulatory networks by integrating diverse annotation sources.

Methodology:

Applies over-representation analysis and miRNA set enrichment analysis (GSEA-like), uses converters between miRBase versions and name-to-precursor mappings, integrates diverse data sources from 19 repositories, and employs direct and indirect annotation methods alongside statistical tools.