Department of General Surgery, The First Clinical School of Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing 210029, P.R. China.
Department of General Surgery, The First Clinical School of Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, Nanjing, China.
Biosci Rep. 2017 Oct 24;37(5). doi: 10.1042/BSR20170750. Print 2017 Oct 31.
Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are recently regarded as a naturally forming family of widespread and diverse endogenous noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) that may regulate gene expression in mammals. At present, above 30000 circRNAs have already been found, with their unique structures to maintain stability more easily than linear RNAs. Several previous literatures stressed on the important role of circRNAs, whose expression was relatively correlated with patients' clinical characteristics and grade, in the carcinogenesis of cancer. CircRNAs are involved in many regulatory bioprocesses of malignance, including cell cycle, tumorigenesis, invasion, metastasis, apoptosis, vascularization, through adsorbing RNA as a sponge, binding to RNA-binding protein (RBP), modulating transcription, or influencing translation. Therefore, it is inevitable to further study the interactions between circRNAs and tumors and to develop novel circRNAs as molecular markers or potential targets, which will provide promising applications in early diagnosis, therapeutic evaluation, prognosis prediction of tumors and even gene therapy for tumors.
环状 RNA（circRNAs）最近被认为是一类广泛存在且多样化的内源性非编码 RNA（ncRNAs）家族，它们可能在哺乳动物中调节基因表达。目前，已经发现了超过 30000 种 circRNAs，其独特的结构使其比线性 RNA 更稳定。一些之前的文献强调了 circRNAs 的重要作用，circRNAs 的表达与患者的临床特征和分级相对相关，在癌症的发生中发挥作用。circRNAs 参与了恶性肿瘤的许多调控生物过程，包括细胞周期、肿瘤发生、侵袭、转移、凋亡、血管生成，通过作为海绵吸附 RNA、结合 RNA 结合蛋白（RBP）、调节转录或影响翻译。因此，进一步研究 circRNAs 与肿瘤之间的相互作用，开发新型 circRNAs 作为分子标记或潜在靶点是不可避免的，这将为肿瘤的早期诊断、治疗评估、预后预测甚至肿瘤的基因治疗提供有前途的应用。
