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Overexpression of a long noncoding RNA called MINCR causes many changes in expression levels of genes involved in cancer, according to a study published October 15 in Genomics, and its downregulation affects neurodegeneration-related genes. Finding a role for MINCR in both neurodegeneration and cancer hints at broad effects that lncRNAs are likely having in many pathological and developmental scenarios.
“There’s a lot of emerging data that connects brain cancer with normal developmental processes in the brain,” says John Prensner, a pediatric oncologist and researcher at Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Boston Children’s Hospital, and Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the study. “These [long noncoding] RNAs have multiple and flexible functions in different contexts,” he adds, “so one of the central strengths of the paper is to be able to start to tie together these different disease processes.”
Some estimates have put the number ...
