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Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has been routinely used for the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer. However, the relationship between the MRI tumor phenotypes and the underlying genetic mechanisms remains under-explored. We integrated multi-omics molecular data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) with MRI data from The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) for 91 breast invasive carcinomas.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small biological molecules that play an important role during the mechanisms of protein formation. Recent findings have demonstrated that they act as both positive and negative regulators of protein formation. Thus, the investigation of miRNAs, i.e., the determination of their level of expression, has developed a huge interest in the scientific community. One of the leading technologies for extracting miRNA data from biological samples is the miRNA Affymetrix platform.

High-confidence prediction of complex traits such as disease risk or drug response is an ultimate goal of personalized medicine. Although genome-wide association studies have discovered thousands of well-replicated polymorphisms associated with a broad spectrum of complex traits, the combined predictive power of these associations for any given trait is generally too low to be of clinical relevance. We propose a novel systems approach to complex trait prediction, which leverages and integrates similarity in genetic, transcriptomic, or other omics-level data.

We study microRNA (miRNA) bindings to metastable RNA secondary structures close to minimum free energy conformations in the context of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and messenger RNA (mRNA) concentration levels, i.e. whether features of miRNA bindings to metastable conformations could provide additional information supporting the differences in expression levels of the two sequences defined by a SNP.