Blood microRNAs (miRNAs) are prominent minimally invasive disease biomarker candidates, which are abundantly found in blood derivatives and are less prone to nuclease digestion and degradation than longer RNA. plasmiR is an exclusively manually curated database of circulating miRNA biomarkers. It collects and caters experimental evidence on the biomarker potential of more than 250 blood, plasma or serum miRNAs against 112 diseases. plasmiR features more than 790 diagnostic entries and more than 220 prognostic entries which are annotated with their respective outcomes. Extensive effort was placed to not include potentially spurious results from articles merely assessing differential abundance; instead plasmiR features evidence for potential biomarkers that was specifically assessed via adequate statistical methods (e.g. Receiver Operating Characteristic curve analysis to test diagnostic value and Cox-regression analysis to test prognostic value).
plasmiR incorporates:
113 associations of circulating miRNAs with patient survival
382 diagnostic and 183 prognostic entries against 32 cancerous and neoplastic conditions
82 diagnostic and 8 prognostic entries against 9 neurological and neurodegenerative disorders
121 diagnostic and 16 prognostic entries against 26 cardiovascular diseases
43 diagnostic and 6 prognostic entries against 9 metabolic disorders
Each entry is accompanied by precious meta-information regarding the experimental setup and cohort details, such as the utilized quantification methods and kits, statistical methods used for biomarker validation, cohort sizes, sex ratios and age. One or multiple miRNAs and systematically curated disease names can be queried simultaneously, enabling easy exploration of the database content from various focal points. plasmiR provides hyperlinks towards reference disease (CTD Disease Vocabulary, MeSH, OMIM, Disease Ontology) and miRNA (miRBase, RNACentral, DIANA-TarBase v8.0, DIANA-miRPath v3.0) resources, as well as towards the original publications. Result-specific visualizations, as well as the miRNA-disease entries themselves, can be retrieved for local use without restrictions.
Content last updated on June 17th, 2021
Please cite:
Spyros Tastsoglou, Marios Miliotis, Ioannis Kavakiotis, Athanasios Alexiou, Elena Gkotsi, Anastasia Lambropoulou, Vasileios Lygnos, Vasiliki Kotsira, Vasileios Maroulis, Dimitrios Zisis, Giorgos Skoufos & Artemis G Hatzigeorgiou. plasmiR: a manual collection of circulating microRNAs of prognostic and diagnostic value. Cancers 2021, 13(15), 3680; https://doi.org/10.3390/cancers13153680
This work was supported by Project “ELIXIR-GR: The Greek Research Infrastructure for Data Management and Analysis in Life Sciences” (MIS-5002780) which is implemented under the Action “Reinforcement of the Research and Innovation Infrastructure” and the Operational Programme “Competitiveness, Entrepreneurship and Innovation” (NSRF 2014–2020), and co-financed by Greece and the European Union (European Regional Development Fund). It was also co-financed (Greece and European Social Fund-ESF) through the Operational Programme “Human Resources Development, Education and Lifelong Learning” in the context of the project “Strengthening Human Resources Research Potential via Doctorate Research” (MIS-5000432), implemented by the State Scholarships Foundation (ΙΚΥ), and by the “Call of interest for postdoctoral researchers, scholarship for postdoctoral research” of University of Thessaly that is implemented by University of Thessaly and funded by the “Stavros Niarchos Foundation”
