Evans Joseph R, Feng Felix Y, Chinnaiyan Arul M
J Clin Invest. 2016 Aug 1;126(8):2775-82. doi: 10.1172/JCI84421.
The traditional view of genome organization has been upended in the last decade with the discovery of vast amounts of non-protein-coding transcription. After initial concerns that this "dark matter" of the genome was transcriptional noise, it is apparent that a subset of these noncoding RNAs are functional. Long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) genes resemble protein-coding genes in several key aspects, and they have myriad molecular functions across many cellular pathways and processes, including oncogenic signaling. The number of lncRNA genes has recently been greatly expanded by our group to triple the number of protein-coding genes; therefore, lncRNAs are likely to play a role in many biological processes. Based on their large number and expression specificity in a variety of cancers, lncRNAs are likely to serve as the basis for many clinical applications in oncology.
在过去十年中，随着大量非蛋白质编码转录的发现，传统的基因组组织观点被颠覆。最初人们担心基因组的这种“暗物质”是转录噪音，但很明显，这些非编码RNA的一个子集是有功能的。长链非编码RNA（lncRNA）基因在几个关键方面类似于蛋白质编码基因，并且它们在许多细胞途径和过程中具有无数的分子功能，包括致癌信号传导。最近我们团队大大扩展了lncRNA基因的数量，使其达到蛋白质编码基因数量的三倍；因此，lncRNAs可能在许多生物学过程中发挥作用。基于它们在多种癌症中的大量存在和表达特异性，lncRNAs很可能成为肿瘤学中许多临床应用的基础。
