EpimiR: a database of curated mutual regulation between miRNAs and epigenetic modifications.

As two kinds of important transcription regulators, both epigenetic
modification and miRNA can regulate gene expression in a wide range of
complex diseases. Recently, many studies have demonstrated that
epigenetics and miRNA can regulate each other in many biological
processes. For instance, methylation of promoter-associated CpG
dinucleotides (especially in CpG islands) usually correlates with
reduced transcription levels of corresponding miRNAs and subsequently
induces the expression of miRNA target genes. Additionally, histone
modifications have been discovered to play positive or negative roles in
controlling miRNA expression in various normal cells and diseases. On
the other hand, miRNA exerts its curative effects on regulating DNA
methylation or histone modification through directly targeting
epigenetic enzymes or functional protein complexes. Thus, we developed a
comprehensive database named EpimiR to store the experimentally
validated mutual regulations between epigenetic modifications and
miRNAs. The EpimiR database have obtained 1945 regulatory relationships
between 18 types of epigenetic modification (including DNA methylation,
histone acetylation, H3K4me3 and H3K27me3, etc.) and 615 miRNAs across 6
species (including human, mouse, chicken, virus, canine, and
arabidopsis) from nearly 2000 literatures. The records that were stored
in the EpimiR database can be divided into 2 parts: Epi2miR and miR2Epi.
Users can search, submit, and download with a user-friendly interface.

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