Prediction of miRNA in Human MHC that Encodes Different Immunological Functions Using Support Vector Machines

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are short non-coding RNAs known to be involved in the gene regulatory functions in human. Major histocompatibility complex (MHC) located on the short arm of chromosome 6 remains as one of the most important regions associated with several human diseases. The complex spans ~4 Mb and covers >120 expressed genes. Gene expression at transcriptional and post transcriptional level is modulated by microRNA (miRNA) in collision with sequence polymorphism and epigenetic factors. In this study, we aim to predict miRNA responsible for different immunological functions and disorders in MHC region. Sequential and structural features of microRNAs were used for the classification of miRNA and other non-coding RNA data. Support vector machine (SVM) classifier was used for prediction and evaluated by jackknife validation technique. Overall accuracy was found to be 97.56% using leave-one-out cross validation technique. These experimental results confirm that our classification method predicts immune related miRNA with high accuracy.