LncDisease: a sequence based bioinformatics tool for predicting lncRNA-disease associations

The Function and Therapeutic Potential of Long Non-coding RNAs in Cardiovascular Development and Disease

The popularization of genome-wide analyses and RNA sequencing led to the discovery that a large part of the human genome, while effectively transcribed, does not encode proteins. Long non-coding RNAs have emerged as critical regulators of gene expression in both normal and disease states. Studies of long non-coding RNAs expressed in the heart, in combination with gene association studies, revealed that these molecules are regulated during cardiovascular development and disease. Some long non-coding RNAs have been functionally implicated in cardiac pathophysiology and constitute potential therapeutic targets. Here, we review the current knowledge of the function of long non-coding RNAs in the cardiovascular system, with an emphasis on cardiovascular development and biology, focusing on hypertension, coronary artery disease, myocardial infarction, ischemia, and heart failure. We discuss potential therapeutic implications and the challenges of long non-coding RNA research, with directions for future research and translational focus.

LncRNA GAS5 controls cardiac fibroblast activation and fibrosis by targeting miR-21 via PTEN/MMP-2 signaling pathway

Long noncoding RNAs (LncRNAs) are aberrantly expressed in many diseases including cardiac fibrosis. LncRNA growth arrest-specific 5 (GAS5) is reported as a significant mediator in the control of cell proliferation and growth; however, the role and function in cardiac fibrosis remain unknown. In this study, we confirmed that GAS5 was lowly expressed in cardiac fibrosis tissues as well as activated cardiac fibroblast. Overexpression of GAS5 inhibited the proliferation of cardiac fibroblast. Moreover, microRNA-21 (miR-21) has been reported to be overexpressed in cardiac fibrosis tissues as well as activated cardiac fibroblast, which is responsible for the progression of cardiac fibrosis. We found that up-regulated GAS5 decreased the expression of miR-21 significantly. Furthermore, GAS5 that upregulated or downregulated the expression of PTEN through miR-21 in cardiac fibroblasts. Taken together, GAS5 plays a suppressive role in cardiac fibrosis via negative regulation of miR-21. These results indicated that GAS5 may be a novel therapeutic target for further research of cardiac fibrosis.

An Insight into the Increasing Role of LncRNAs in the Pathogenesis of Gliomas

Long non-coding RNAs (LncRNAs) are essential epigenetic regulators with critical roles in tumor initiation and malignant progression. However, the roles and mechanisms of aberrantly expressed lncRNAs in the pathogenesis of gliomas are not fully understood. With the development of deep sequencing analyses, an extensive amount of functional non-coding RNAs has been discovered in glioma tissues and cell lines. Additionally, the contributions of several lncRNAs, such as Hox transcript antisense intergenic RNA, H19 and Colorectal neoplasia differentially expressed, previously reported to be involved in other pathogenesis and processes to the oncogenesis of glioblastoma are currently addressed. Thus, lncRNAs detected in tumor tissues could serve as candidate diagnostic biomarkers and therapeutic targets for gliomas. To understand the potential function of lncRNAs in gliomas, in this review, we briefly describe the profile of lncRNAs in human glioma research and therapy. Then, we discuss the individual lncRNA that has been under intensive investigation in glioma research, and the focus is its mechanism and clinical implication.

Global Prioritizing Disease Candidate lncRNAs via a Multi-level Composite Network

LncRNAs play pivotal roles in many important biological processes, but research on the functions of lncRNAs in human disease is still in its infancy. Therefore, it is urgent to prioritize lncRNAs that are potentially associated with diseases. In this work, we developed a novel algorithm, LncPriCNet, that uses a multi-level composite network to prioritize candidate lncRNAs associated with diseases. By integrating genes, lncRNAs, phenotypes and their associations, LncPriCNet achieves an overall performance superior to that of previous methods, with high AUC values of up to 0.93. Notably, LncPriCNet still performs well when information on known disease lncRNAs is lacking. When applied to breast cancer, LncPriCNet identified known breast cancer-related lncRNAs, revealed novel lncRNA candidates and inferred their functions via pathway analysis. We further constructed the human disease-lncRNA landscape, revealed the modularity of the disease-lncRNA network and identified several lncRNA hotspots. In summary, LncPriCNet is a useful tool for prioritizing disease-related lncRNAs and may facilitate understanding of the molecular mechanisms of human disease at the lncRNA level.

Extensive ceRNA-ceRNA interaction networks mediated by miRNAs regulate development in multiple rhesus tissues

Crosstalk between RNAs mediated by shared microRNAs (miRNAs) represents a novel layer of gene regulation, which plays important roles in development. In this study, we analyzed time series expression data for coding genes and long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) to identify thousands of interactions among competitive endogenous RNAs (ceRNAs) in four rhesus tissues. The ceRNAs exhibited dynamic expression and regulatory patterns during each tissue development process, which suggests that ceRNAs might work synergistically during different developmental stages or tissues to control specific functions. In addition, lncRNAs exhibit higher specificity as ceRNAs than coding-genes and their functions were predicted based on their competitive coding-gene partners to discover their important developmental roles. In addition to the specificity of tissue development, functional analyses demonstrated that the combined effects of multiple ceRNAs can have major impacts on general developmental and metabolic processes in multiple tissues, especially transcription-related functions where competitive interactions. Moreover, ceRNA interactions could sequentially and/or synergistically mediate the crosstalk among different signaling pathways during brain development. Analyzing ceRNA interactions during the development of multiple tissues will provideinsights in the regulation of normal development and the dysregulation of key mechanisms during pathogenesis.