miR2Trait: an integrated resource for investigating miRNA-disease associations

MicroRNAs are key components of cellular regulatory networks, and breakdown in miRNA function could lead to cascading effects culminating in pathophenotypes. A better understanding of the role of miRNAs in diseases would aid human health. Here, we have devised a method for comprehensively mapping the associations between miRNAs and diseases by merging on a common key between two curated omics databases. The resulting bidirectional resource, miR2Trait, is more detailed than earlier catalogues, uncovers new relationships, and includes analytical utilities to interrogate and extract knowledge from these datasets. The resource could aid in identifying the disease enrichment of a user-given set of miRNAs and analyzing the miRNA profile of a specified diseasome. miR2Trait is available as both a web-server (<ext-link xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="https://sas.sastra.edu/pymir18">https://sas.sastra.edu/pymir18</ext-link>) and an open-source command-line interface (<ext-link xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="https://github.com/miR2Trait">https://github.com/miR2Trait</ext-link>) under MIT license for both commercial and non-commercial use. The datasets are available for download at: <ext-link xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.8288825">https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.8288825</ext-link>.