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Fig. 4 | BMC Genomics

Fig. 4

From: Ancient human miRNAs are more likely to have broad functions and disease associations than young miRNAs

Fig. 4

miRNAs associated with disease are older than expected from the background miRNA age distribution. (a) The median age of the miRNAs associated with disease is 97.4 MY compared to 26.9 MY for non-disease miRNAs. This relationship also holds at the individual disease level (Additional file 3). (b) The median age of the miRNAs associated with hepatocellular carcinoma is 535.7 MY; this is significantly older than expected if they were randomly drawn from all miRNAs (P = 2.5e–38, Mann-Whitney U test). Cancers are particularly enriched for old miRNA; the miRNAs associated with 80% of all cancers in our dataset are significantly (P < 0.01) older than expected by chance. Asterisks indicate a significant difference in the number of miRNA associated with disease of a given age than expected (“***” for P < 0.001, “**” for P < 0.01, and “*” for P < 0.05)

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