Title

Oncomirs: The potential role of non-coding microRNAs in understanding cancer

Authors

Jayapal Manikandan¹, Joseph Jude Aarthi¹, Srinivasan Dinesh Kumar² and Peter Natesan Pushparaj^1, *

Affiliation

¹Department of Physiology, MD9, 2 Medical Drive, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Singapore-117597; ²Department of Anatomy, MD 10, 4 Medical Drive, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Singapore-117597

Email

phspnp@nus.edu.sg

65 90103795/65167391;  * Corresponding author

Article Type

Current Trends

Date

received February 20, 2008; revised April 23, 2008; accepted April 24, 2008; published May 20, 2008

Abstract

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are members of a family of non-coding RNAs of 8-24 nucleotide RNA molecules that regulate target mRNAs. The first miRNAs, lin-4 and let-7, were first discovered in the year 1993 by Ambros, Ruvkun, and co-workers while studying development in Caenorhabditis elegans. miRNAs can play vital functions form C. elegans to higher vertebrates by typical Watson-Crick base pairing to specific mRNAs to regulate the expression of a specific gene. It has been well established that multicellular eukaryotes utilize miRNAs to regulate many biological processes such as embryonic development, proliferation, differentiation, and cell death. Recent studies have shown that miRNAs may provide new insight in cancer research. A recent study demonstrated that more than 50% of miRNA genes are located in fragile sites and cancer-associated genomic regions, suggesting that miRNAs may play a more important role in the pathogenesis of human cancers. Exploiting the emerging knowledge of miRNAs for the development of new human therapeutic applications will be important. Recent studies suggest that miRNA expression profiling can be correlated with disease pathogenesis and prognosis, and may ultimately be useful in the management of human cancer. In this review, we focus on how miRNAs regulate tumorigenesis by acting as oncogenes and anti-oncogenes in higher eukaryotes.

Keywords

C. elegans; cancer; miRNA; oncomirs; non-coding

Citation

Manikandan et al., Bioinformation 2(8): 330-334 (2008)

Edited by

P. Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.