Guest Editors
Tao Liu, Children’s Cancer Institute Australia & The University of New South Wales, Australia. Email: tliu@ccia.unsw.edu.au
Xu Dong Zhang, University of Newcastle Australia, Australia. Email: xu.zhang@newcastle.com.au
Summary
Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are emerging as critical tumorigenic factors and therapeutic targets in the past decade. Originally regarded as transcriptional junks, lncRNAs have been demonstrated to regulate gene transcription, mRNA stability, degradation, protein translation and stability/degradation, leading to aberrant expression of tumor suppressors and oncogenic factors. LncRNAs therefore play important roles in malignant transformation, cancer cell proliferation, survival, migration, metastasis, tumor initiation, tumor progression, and cancer cell resistance to anticancer therapies. There are several ways to target lncRNAs: suppressing gene transcription and RNA stability/decay, gene editing with CRISPR–Cas9 or CRISPR–Cas13, disrupting secondary structure, or suppressing the interaction between lncRNAs and binding proteins. Recently, small molecule compounds have been developed to block lncRNA interaction with proteins important for its decay, disrupt the lncRNA motif important for lncRNA stabilization, or block the interaction between lncRNAs and their binding proteins important for their functions. This special issue welcomes manuscript on the role of lncRNAs in tumorigenesis and lncRNA therapies.
Keywords
Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs); tumorigenic; therapeutic targets; oncogenic; malignant transformation
Published Papers