Leitão Ana Lúcia, Enguita Francisco J
Departamento de Química, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecologia, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Campus da Caparica, 2829-516 Caparica, Portugal.
Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de Lisboa, Av. Prof. Egas Moniz, 1649-028 Lisboa, Portugal.
Noncoding RNA. 2025 Mar 2;11(2):20. doi: 10.3390/ncrna11020020.
The genomes from complex eukaryotes are enriched in non-coding genes whose transcription products (non-coding RNAs) are involved in the regulation of genomic output at different levels. Non-coding RNA action is predominantly driven by sequence and structural motifs that interact with specific functional partners. Despite the exponential growth in primary RNA sequence data facilitated by next-generation sequencing studies, the availability of tridimensional RNA data is comparatively more limited. The subjacent reasons for this relative lack of information regarding RNA structure are related to the specific chemical nature of RNA molecules and the limitations of the currently available methods for structural characterization of biomolecules. In this review, we describe and analyze the different structural motifs involved in non-coding RNA function and the wet-lab and computational methods used to characterize their structure-function relationships, highlighting the current need for detailed structural studies to explore the molecular determinants of non-coding RNA function.
复杂真核生物的基因组富含非编码基因，其转录产物（非编码RNA）参与不同水平的基因组输出调控。非编码RNA的作用主要由与特定功能伙伴相互作用的序列和结构基序驱动。尽管下一代测序研究推动了初级RNA序列数据呈指数增长，但三维RNA数据的可用性相对更有限。关于RNA结构的信息相对缺乏的根本原因与RNA分子的特定化学性质以及目前用于生物分子结构表征的方法的局限性有关。在这篇综述中，我们描述并分析了参与非编码RNA功能的不同结构基序，以及用于表征其结构-功能关系的湿实验室和计算方法，强调了当前对详细结构研究的需求，以探索非编码RNA功能的分子决定因素。
