The bright side of dark matter: lncRNAs in cancer
Joseph R. Evans, … , Felix Y. Feng, Arul M. Chinnaiyan
Joseph R. Evans, … , Felix Y. Feng, Arul M. Chinnaiyan
Published August 1, 2016
Citation Information: J Clin Invest. 2016;126(8):2775-2782. https://doi.org/10.1172/JCI84421.
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Review

The bright side of dark matter: lncRNAs in cancer

Abstract

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.

Authors

Joseph R. Evans, Felix Y. Feng, Arul M. Chinnaiyan

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Figure 1

Scale of lncRNA genes.

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Scale of lncRNA genes. The identification of lncRNA genes has progressed...
The identification of lncRNA genes has progressed rapidly since their recognition. Early efforts identified several thousand lncRNA genes at a time, and there were initial indications that lncRNAs exhibited greater expression restriction than protein-coding genes. Through our large-scale MiTranscriptome bioinformatics effort, we greatly expanded the number of lncRNAs to nearly 60,000, while the number of protein-coding genes remained approximately 21,000. Additionally, our pipeline demonstrated that nearly 8,000 lncRNA genes were highly cancer and/or lineage specific.