2.3 Identification of miRNA targets
The MiRWalk 2.0 database (http://mirwalk.umm.uni-heidelberg.de/) integrates some miRNA databases and provides a huge amount of predicted and experimentally validated information about the binding targets of miRNAs (Sticht et al., 2018). We obtained the results of significant DEMs and their target mRNAs from the MiRwalk 2.0 retrieval system. Then, we used an online webtool, Venn diagrams (http://bioinformatics.psb.ugent.be/webtools/Venn/) to screen the genes from the intersection between the DEGs obtained from the GEO dataset and the targeted mRNAs predicted by MiRwalk 2.0. These intersected genes were selected as significant DEGs.