Identification and functional characterization of microRNAs reveal a potential role in gastric cancer progression

Purpose To investigate the potential candidate microRNA (miRNA) biomarkers for the clinical diagnosis, classification, and prognosis of gastric cancer (GC). Methods We use bioinformatics overlapping subclasses analysis to find the tumor grade and lymphatic metastasis-related GC specific miRNAs from the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. Then, we further investigated these GC specific miRNAs distributions in different GC clinical features and their correlations overall survival on the basis of GC patients’ information and their related RNA sequencing profile from TCGA. Finally, we randomly selected some of key miRNAs use qRT-PCR to confirm the reliability and validity. Results 22 GC specific key miRNAs were identified (Fold-change >2, P