Figure 3

Schematic explanations of miRNA independent regulatory power and status from cancer miRNA studies. Panel (A) shows the miRNA NOD distribution in the whole human miRNA-mRNA target network. Schematic examples of miRNAs with different NODs are provided in panel (B). The status of literature reported cancer miRNA biomarkers and differentially expressed (DE) miRNAs by low-throughput methods are shown in panel (C) and panel (D). The numbers used to compute the percentage in each miRNA group are provided above the corresponding bars (e.g., 10/255 denotes that 10 out of 255 miRNAs within the first miRNA group with a NOD value of 0 were reported as cancer biomarkers in previous studies). The statistical significance levels were computed with Pearson’s chi-square test.