Significance: Wound healing is a basic physiological process that is utilized to keep the integrity of the skin. Impaired wound repair, such as chronic wounds and pathological scars, presents a major health and economic burden worldwide. To date, efficient targeted treatment for these wound disorders is still lacking, which is largely due to our limited understanding of the biological mechanisms ...
Read More »Monthly Archives: March 2017
Dietary anti-cancer compound may work by influence over lncRNAs
Researchers have discovered one of the reasons why broccoli may be good for your health. They found that sulforaphane, a dietary compound from broccoli that’s known to help prevent prostate cancer, may work through its influence on long, non-coding RNAs. This is another step forward in a compelling new area of study on the underlying genetics of cancer development and ...
Read More »IntNetLncSim – an integrative network analysis method to infer human lncRNA functional similarity
Increasing evidence indicated that long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) were involved in various biological processes and complex diseases by communicating with mRNAs/miRNAs each other. Exploiting interactions between lncRNAs and mRNA/miRNAs to lncRNA functional similarity (LFS) is an effective method to explore function of lncRNAs and predict novel lncRNA-disease associations. Researchers from Harbin Medical University have proposed an integrative framework, IntNetLncSim, to ...
Read More »Targeting lncRNA to reduce heart failure in pulmonary hypertension
An article published in Experimental Biology and Medicine identifies a new signaling pathway that promotes heart failure in pulmonary hypertension. The study, led by Dr. Matthias Brock, from the Division of Pulmonology, University Hospital of Zurich, University of Zurich in Switzerland, reports that inhibition of MALAT1, a long noncoding RNA, reduces heart hypertrophy in mice with pulmonary hypertension. Pulmonary hypertension ...
Read More »The Influence of microRNAs and Long Non-Coding RNAs in Cancer Chemoresistance
Innate and acquired chemoresistance exhibited by most tumours exposed to conventional chemotherapeutic agents account for the majority of relapse cases in cancer patients. Such chemoresistance phenotypes are of a multi-factorial nature from multiple key molecular players. The discovery of the RNA interference pathway in 1998 and the widespread gene regulatory influences exerted by microRNAs (miRNAs) and other non-coding RNAs have ...
Read More »Post-doc Position Available – Structure and Mechanisms of Gene-regulatory Noncoding RNAs
A fully funded postdoctoral position (up to 5 years) is available in the Structural Biology of Noncoding RNAs and Ribonucleoproteins Section, Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB), NIDDK, in NIH’s vibrant main campus in Bethesda, MD near Washington DC. The lab addresses a widening gap between the accelerated discovery and functional description of the noncoding transcriptome, and a paucity of 3D ...
Read More »Long non-coding RNA CASC2 in human cancer
Long non-coding RNAs cover large part of the non-coding information of the human DNA, which represents more than 90% of the whole genome. They constitute a wide and complex group of molecules with more than 200 nucleotides, which generally lack an open reading frame, and are involved in various ways in the pathophysiology of cancer. Their roles in the regulation ...
Read More »Researchers develop new CRISPR sgRNA design tool, demonstrate efficient CRISPR deletion of an enhancer and exonic fragment of the lncRNA MALAT1
CRISPR-Cas9 technology can be used to engineer precise genomic deletions with pairs of single guide RNAs (sgRNAs). This approach has been widely adopted for diverse applications, from disease modelling of individual loci, to parallelized loss-of-function screens of thousands of regulatory elements. However, no solution has been presented for the unique bioinformatic design requirements of CRISPR deletion. Researchers from the Centre for ...
Read More »An atlas and analysis of bovine skeletal muscle long noncoding RNAs
Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) have various biological functions and have been extensively studied in recent years. However, the identification and characterization of bovine lncRNAs in skeletal muscle has been very limited compared with that of lncRNAs in other model organisms. In this study, researchers from Tianjin Agricultural University identified 7188 bovine skeletal muscle lncRNAs in four different muscle tissues by ...
Read More »cis-Acting Complex-Trait-Associated lincRNA Expression Correlates with Modulation of Chromosomal Architecture
Intergenic long noncoding RNAs (lincRNAs) are the largest class of transcripts in the human genome. Although many have recently been linked to complex human traits, the underlying mechanisms for most of these transcripts remain undetermined. Researchers from the University of Lausanne investigated the regulatory roles of a high-confidence and reproducible set of 69 trait-relevant lincRNAs (TR-lincRNAs) in human lymphoblastoid cells ...
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