Abstract
BACKGROUND: TEK signaling plays a very important role in folliculogenesis. It activates Ras/ERK/MYC, PI3K/AKT/mTORC1 and ovarian steroidogenesis activation pathways. These are the main pathways for cell growth, differentiation, migration, adhesion, proliferation, survival and protein synthesis. RESULTS: TEK signaling on each of the two important pathways where levels of pERK, pMYC, pAkt, pMCL1 and pEIF4EBP1 are increased in dominant follicles and pMYC is decreased in dominant follicles. Over activation of ERK and MYC which are the main cell growth and proliferation and over activation of Akt, MCl1, mTORC1 and EIF4EBP1 which are the main cell survival and protein synthesis factors act as promoting factors for folliculogenesis. In case of over expression of hsa-miR-30d-3p and hsa-miR-451a, MYC activity level is considerably increased in subordinate follicles. Our simulation results show that in the presence of has-miR-548v and bta-miR-22-3p, downstream factors of pathways are inhibited. CONCLUSIONS: Our work offers insight into the design of natural biological procedures and makes predictions that can guide further experimental studies on folliculogenesis pathways. Moreover, it defines a simple signal processing unit that may be useful for engineering synthetic biology and genes circuits to carry out cell-based computation.