Department of Experimental Oncology, European Institute of Oncology (IEO), I-20139 Milan, Italy.
Annu Rev Genet. 2012;46:1-19. doi: 10.1146/annurev-genet-110711-155459. Epub 2012 Aug 16.
Mammalian genomes are extensively transcribed outside the borders of protein-coding genes. Genome-wide studies recently demonstrated that cis-regulatory genomic elements implicated in transcriptional control, such as enhancers and locus-control regions, represent major sites of extragenic noncoding transcription. Enhancer-templated transcripts provide a quantitatively small contribution to the total amount of cellular nonribosomal RNA; nevertheless, the possibility that enhancer transcription and the resulting enhancer RNAs may, in some cases, have functional roles, rather than represent mere transcriptional noise at accessible genomic regions, is supported by an increasing amount of experimental data. In this article we review the current knowledge on enhancer transcription and its functional implications.
哺乳动物基因组在蛋白编码基因的边界之外广泛转录。最近的全基因组研究表明，参与转录调控的顺式调控基因组元件，如增强子和基因座控制区，代表了外显子非编码转录的主要位点。增强子模板转录本对细胞非核糖体 RNA 的总量贡献很小；然而，越来越多的实验数据支持这样一种可能性，即增强子转录和由此产生的增强子 RNA 在某些情况下可能具有功能作用，而不是代表可及基因组区域的转录噪声。本文综述了增强子转录及其功能意义的最新知识。
