Ren Shuyue, Lin Peirong, Wang Jingrong, Yu Haoying, Lv Tingting, Sun Lan, Du Guanhua
Chinese Academy of Medical Science and Peking Union Medical College, Institute of Materia Medica, The State Key Laboratory of Bioactive Substance and Function of Natural Medicines, and Beijing Key Laboratory of Drug Targets Identification and Drug Screening, 1 Xian Nong Tan Street, Beijing 100050, China.
Department of Anesthesiology, Beijing AnZhen Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing Institute of Heart Lung and Blood Vessel Diseases, Beijing 100029, China.
Mol Ther Methods Clin Dev. 2020 Jun 6;18:215-229. doi: 10.1016/j.omtm.2020.05.027. eCollection 2020 Sep 11.
Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are a new class of noncoding single-stranded RNAs that differ from linear microRNAs (miRNAs), since they form covalently closed loop structures without free 3' poly(A) tails or 5' caps. circRNAs are the competitive endogenous RNAs (ceRNAs) by binding to miRNA through miRNA response elements (MREs) (i.e., "miRNA sponge"), thereby reducing the quantity of miRNA available to target mRNA, subsequently promoting mRNA stability or protein expression, which involves the initiation and progress of human diseases. Owing to these features of abundance, stability, conservative property, and tissue and stage specificity, widely distributing in the extracellular space and in various bodily fluids, circRNAs can be considered as potential biomarkers for various diseases. Here, we reviewed the promising circRNAs being disease biomarkers, focused on their regulatory function by acting as miRNA sponges, and described their roles in cancer, cardiovascular or neurodegenerative diseases, osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, and other human aging-related diseases, which provide a new direction for pathogenesis, diagnosis, and treatment of human aging-related diseases.
环状RNA（circRNAs）是一类新型的非编码单链RNA，与线性微小RNA（miRNAs）不同，因为它们形成共价闭合环状结构，没有游离的3'聚腺苷酸尾或5'帽。circRNAs通过miRNA反应元件（MREs）（即“miRNA海绵”）与miRNA结合，从而成为竞争性内源性RNA（ceRNAs），进而减少可用于靶向mRNA的miRNA数量，随后促进mRNA稳定性或蛋白质表达，这涉及人类疾病的发生和发展。由于circRNAs具有丰度高、稳定性强、保守性以及组织和阶段特异性等特点，广泛分布于细胞外空间和各种体液中，因此可被视为各种疾病的潜在生物标志物。在此，我们综述了有望成为疾病生物标志物的circRNAs，重点关注其作为miRNA海绵的调控功能，并描述了它们在癌症、心血管或神经退行性疾病、骨关节炎、类风湿性关节炎、糖尿病以及其他人类衰老相关疾病中的作用，这为人类衰老相关疾病的发病机制、诊断和治疗提供了新方向。
