UFPR Science: Research reveals that non-coding RNA helps understand difficult diseases

The researchers point out that networked medicine loses relevant information by excluding parts of the human genome from computer systems that are not involved in producing proteins. Pre-eclampsia, rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn’s disease are among the diseases that can have exposing factors.

You may have never heard of retinal medicine, but chances are you have already used a treatment or medication created based on this technology. This expanding field of research brings together data sets and evidence in computer systems to better understand how diseases work. This includes genetic data that is studied in these systems in a complex way.

After all, the idea behind network medicine is that diseases are not caused by errors in a single gene or molecule, but rather by disturbances in multiple genes, all linked in complex networks of biological interactions.

The problem is that network medicine may miss important information by excluding data on elements of the human genome that do not function in producing proteins, which is why they are called “non-coding” or “untranslated.” Conclusion in An article published in the magazine Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) Prepared by researchers Daisy Morselli Jesse, professor at the Department of Statistics at the Federal University of Parana (UFPR), and Albert Laszlo Barabási, from Northeastern University (USA). […]

Thus, to test the importance of non-coding RNA in network medicine, scientists created two computational systems that were compared, a traditional system that focuses solely on coding RNA, and another that also includes the presence of ncRNA.

During the study, tests were performed with data for about 800 diseases, three of which were highlighted in the work.

Read the full article with the graph, On the Science UFPR website

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