View article

Background: Short regulating RNAs guide many cellular processes. Compared with transcription factor proteins they appear to provide more specialized control and their deletions are less frequently lethal.

Results: We find large differences between computationally predicted lists of human microRNA (miRNA)–target pairs. Instead of integrating these lists we use the two most accurate of them. Next, we construct the co-regulation network of human miRNAs as nodes by computing the correlation (link weight) between the gene silencing scores of individual miRNAs. In this network, we locate groups of tightly co-regulating nodes (modules). Despite explicitly allowing overlaps the co-regulation modules of miRNAs are well separated. We use the modules and miRNA co-expression data to define and compute miRNA essentiality. Instead of focusing on particular biological functions we identify a …