The dysregulation of physiological
microRNA (
miRNA) activity has been shown to play an important role in gliomagenesis. In a previous study, using
microRNA arrays and
glioma tissues found that miR-27a was upregulated, which was also identified in the
glioma cell lines and samples by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). In this study, in order to explore the potential roles of miR-27a in the progression of
glioma, we first utilized text-mining of PubMed abstracts with natural language processing (NLP) to identify 1,168
glioma-related molecules. In addition, miR-27a targets predicted by computational methods were integrated with the results from NLP analysis, followed by Gene Ontology (GO), pathway and network analysis. We identified 33 hub genes by overlap calculation and demonstrated that miR-27a may be involved in the progression of
glioma through adherens junction, focal adhesion, the
neurotrophin signaling pathway, the MAPK signaling pathway, the
transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) signaling pathway,
cytokine-
cytokine receptor interactions, the p53 signaling pathway, the apoptotic signaling pathway, as well as others. Our data may provide researchers with a better understanding of the mechanisms of the miR-27a-target network in
glioma initiation and progression.