Chernikova Diana, Managadze David, Glazko Galina V, Makalowski Wojciech, Rogozin Igor B
Department of Genetics, Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Sciences, Geisel School of Medicine, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA.
Information Engineering Branch, National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20894, USA.
Life (Basel). 2016 Jul 15;6(3):27. doi: 10.3390/life6030027.
The abundance of mammalian long intergenic non-coding RNA (lincRNA) genes is high, yet their functions remain largely unknown. One possible way to study this important question is to use large-scale comparisons of various characteristics of lincRNA with those of protein-coding genes for which a large body of functional information is available. A prominent feature of mammalian protein-coding genes is the high evolutionary conservation of the exon-intron structure. Comparative analysis of putative intron positions in lincRNA genes from various mammalian genomes suggests that some lincRNA introns have been conserved for over 100 million years, thus the primary and/or secondary structure of these molecules is likely to be functionally important.
哺乳动物长链基因间非编码RNA（lincRNA）基因数量众多，但其功能在很大程度上仍不清楚。研究这个重要问题的一种可能方法是对lincRNA的各种特征与已有大量功能信息的蛋白质编码基因的特征进行大规模比较。哺乳动物蛋白质编码基因的一个显著特征是外显子-内含子结构具有高度的进化保守性。对来自各种哺乳动物基因组的lincRNA基因中假定内含子位置的比较分析表明，一些lincRNA内含子已经保守了超过1亿年，因此这些分子的一级和/或二级结构可能具有重要的功能。
