MicroRNAs mediate liver transcriptome changes upon soy diet intervention in mice

Abstract

Soy-based diets have triggered the interest of the research community due to their beneficial effects on a wide variety of pathologies like breast and prostate cancer, diabetes and atherosclerosis. However, the molecular details underlying these effects are far from being completely understood; several recent attempts have been made to elucidate the soy-induced liver transcriptome changes in different animal models. Here we used Next Generation Sequencing to identify a set of microRNAs specifically modulated by short-term soy-enriched diet in young male mice and estimated their impact on the liver transcriptome assessed by microarray. Clustering and topological community detection (CTCD) network analysis of STRING generated interactions of transcriptome data led to the identification of four topological communities of genes characteristically altered and putatively targeted by microRNAs upon soy diet intervention.