Hypergeometric tests for multiple experimental proportions extracted from the integrated dataset containing information about differentially expressed miRNAs, differentially expressed mRNAs, and putative miRNA targets were implemented in the R environment (R Development Core Team (2010); R: A language and environment for statistical computing; R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. Available from: http://www.R-project.org). Hypergeometric tests for each differentially expressed miRNA were conducted to determine whether corresponding putative targets were over- or under-represented among inversely correlated differentially expressed mRNAs from the same samples. Hypergeometric tests for each differentially expressed mRNA that is predicted to be targeted by more than one miRNA were conducted to determine whether any of such mRNAs could be subjected to “over-targeting” by miRNAs.
