Abstract
BACKGROUND: Autophagy plays a dual role of tumor suppression and tumor promotion in colorectal cancer. The study aimed to find those microRNAs (miRNAs) important in BECN1, LAMP2, and PINK1 regulation and to determine the possible role of the epigenetic changes in examined colorectal cancer using an in silico approach. METHODS: A total of 44 pairs of surgically removed tumors at clinical stages I‒IV and healthy samples (marginal tissues) from patients' guts were analyzed. Analysis of the obtained results was conducted using the PL-Grid Infrastructure and Statistica 12.0 program. The miRNAs and CpG islands were estimated using the microrna.org database and MethPrimer program. RESULTS: The autophagy-related genes were shown to be able to be regulated by miRNAs (BECN1-49 mRNA, LAMP2-62 mRNA, PINK1-6 mRNA). It was observed that promotion regions containing at least one CpG region were present in the sequence of each gene. CONCLUSIONS: The in silico analysis performed allowed us to determine the possible role of epigenetic mechanisms of regulation gene expression, which may be an interesting therapeutic target in the treatment of colorectal cancer.