RNAscope™ Probes for Long Non-coding RNA Biomarkers

In the most recent statistics from the GENCODE project (v19 July 2013), the human genome contains 22,883 non-coding RNA (ncRNA) genes, surpassing the number of protein-coding genes (20,345). Of the ncRNA species, some 30% (9,013) are less than 200 bases long, termed as small ncRNA. About 60% (13,870) of the ncRNAs are longer than 200 bases, and are operationally designated as long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs). Some lncRNAs have been shown to regulate gene expression through a diversity of mechanisms and play important roles in chromatin modification (HOTAIR), transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulation (ZEB2). Dysregulation of lncRNA is being found to have relevance not only in tumorigenesis, but also to neurological, cardiovascular and other diseases.