Derrien Thomas, Guigó Roderic, Johnson Rory
Bioinformatics and Genomics, Centre for Genomic Regulation, Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona, Spain.
Front Genet. 2012 Jan 9;2:107. doi: 10.3389/fgene.2011.00107. eCollection 2011.
The transcriptome of a cell is represented by a myriad of different RNA molecules with and without protein-coding capacities. In recent years, advances in sequencing technologies have allowed researchers to more fully appreciate the complexity of whole transcriptomes, showing that the vast majority of the genome is transcribed, producing a diverse population of non-protein coding RNAs (ncRNAs). Thus, the biological significance of non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) have been largely underestimated. Amongst these multiple classes of ncRNAs, the long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are apparently the most numerous and functionally diverse. A small but growing number of lncRNAs have been experimentally studied, and a view is emerging that these are key regulators of epigenetic gene regulation in mammalian cells. LncRNAs have already been implicated in human diseases such as cancer and neurodegeneration, highlighting the importance of this emergent field. In this article, we review the catalogs of annotated lncRNAs and the latest advances in our understanding of lncRNAs.
细胞的转录组由无数具有或不具有蛋白质编码能力的不同RNA分子所代表。近年来，测序技术的进步使研究人员能够更全面地认识整个转录组的复杂性，表明基因组的绝大多数都被转录，产生了各种各样的非蛋白质编码RNA（ncRNA）。因此，非编码RNA（ncRNA）的生物学意义在很大程度上被低估了。在这些多种类型的ncRNA中，长链非编码RNA（lncRNA）显然数量最多且功能最为多样。已经对少量但数量不断增加的lncRNA进行了实验研究，并逐渐形成一种观点，即这些是哺乳动物细胞中表观遗传基因调控的关键调节因子。LncRNA已经与癌症和神经退行性疾病等人类疾病有关，突出了这个新兴领域的重要性。在本文中，我们回顾了已注释的lncRNA目录以及我们对lncRNA理解的最新进展。
