Wei Jian-Wei, Huang Kai, Yang Chao, Kang Chun-Sheng
Department of Neurosurgery, Tianjin Medical University General Hospital, Laboratory of Neuro-Oncology, Tianjin Neurological Institute, Key Laboratory of Post-trauma Neuro-repair and Regeneration in the Central Nervous System, Ministry of Education, Tianjin Key Laboratory of Injuries, Variations and Regeneration of the Nervous System, Tianjin 300052, P.R. China.
Oncol Rep. 2017 Jan;37(1):3-9. doi: 10.3892/or.2016.5236. Epub 2016 Nov 8.
Epigenetics is a discipline that studies heritable changes in gene expression that do not involve altering the DNA sequence. Over the past decade, researchers have shown that epigenetic regulation plays a momentous role in cell growth, differentiation, autoimmune diseases, and cancer. The main epigenetic mechanisms include the well-understood phenomenon of DNA methylation, histone modifications, and regulation by non-coding RNAs, a mode of regulation that has only been identified relatively recently and is an area of intensive ongoing investigation. It is generally known that the majority of human transcripts are not translated but a large number of them nonetheless serve vital functions. Non-coding RNAs are a cluster of RNAs that do not encode functional proteins and were originally considered to merely regulate gene expression at the post-transcriptional level. However, taken together, a wide variety of recent studies have suggested that miRNAs, piRNAs, endogenous siRNAs, and long non-coding RNAs are the most common regulatory RNAs, and, significantly, there is a growing body of evidence that regulatory non-coding RNAs play an important role in epigenetic control. Therefore, these non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) highlight the prominent role of RNA in the regulation of gene expression. Herein, we summarize recent research developments with the purpose of coming to a better understanding of non-coding RNAs and their mechanisms of action in cells, thus gaining a preliminary understanding that non-coding RNAs feed back into an epigenetic regulatory network.
表观遗传学是一门研究基因表达的可遗传变化而不涉及DNA序列改变的学科。在过去十年中，研究人员表明表观遗传调控在细胞生长、分化、自身免疫性疾病和癌症中起着重要作用。主要的表观遗传机制包括人们熟知的DNA甲基化现象、组蛋白修饰以及由非编码RNA进行的调控，非编码RNA这种调控方式是直到最近才被发现的，并且是一个正在深入研究的领域。众所周知，大多数人类转录本不被翻译，但其中大量转录本仍然发挥着重要功能。非编码RNA是一类不编码功能蛋白的RNA，最初被认为仅在转录后水平调控基因表达。然而，综合最近的各种研究表明，微小RNA（miRNA）、Piwi相互作用RNA（piRNA）、内源性小干扰RNA（endo-siRNA）和长链非编码RNA（lncRNA）是最常见的调控RNA，并且，重要的是，越来越多的证据表明调控性非编码RNA在表观遗传控制中发挥着重要作用。因此，这些非编码RNA（ncRNA）凸显了RNA在基因表达调控中的重要作用。在此，我们总结近期的研究进展，以期更好地理解非编码RNA及其在细胞中的作用机制，从而初步了解非编码RNA如何反馈到表观遗传调控网络中。
