Title

Authors

Affiliation

Department of Biological Sciences, BITS, Pilani - KK Birla Goa Campus, Zuarinagar, Goa - 403726, India

Email

sumit@bits-goa.ac.in; *Corresponding author

Article Type

Views & Challenges

Date

Received April 04, 2011; Accepted July 12, 2011; Published July 19, 2011

The last decade was taken by storm when the existence of a class of small (~22nt long) non – coding RNA species, known as microRNAs (miRNAs) came into light. MicroRNAs are one of the most abundant groups of regulatory genes in multicellular organisms and play fundamental roles in many cellular processes. Among these, miRNAs have been shown to prevent cell division and drive terminal differentiation, thus playing a causal role in the generation or maintenance of cancerous tumours. The unique expression profiles of different miRNAs in various types and stages of cancer suggest their performance as novel biomarkers. This discussion focuses on miRNAs implicated in cancer-associated events and strives to re-establish their sequential features which may classify them to be oncogenic.

Keywords

microRNA, oncogene, sequence trademarks, purines

Citation

Sharma & Biswas. Bioinformation 6(9): 364-365 (2011)
 

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.