Highly Conserved, Large, Non-Coding Transcripts and their Role in the Development of Breast Cancer

摘要

The sequencing of the human genome has revealed that only 2% of the genome actually codes for protein. However, the remainder of the genome is not 'junk' and it has recently been revealed that most of the genome is transcriptionally active. We utilized a tiling array approach to examine the entire genome for transcriptional activity and found a large number of non- coding transcripts. When we originally proposed the work in this Concept Award, we proposed to study a group of long, highly conserved, non-coding transcripts which had altered expression and sometimes mutations in breast cancer. We have subsequently found that many of these highly conserved transcripts are either part of known genes or highly homologous to known genes. However, we've now identified two new groups of novel non-coding transcripts which are not part of genes. The first group is noncoding transcripts that have increased expression in response to the DNA damage induced by the carcinogen NNK. The second group is identified by analyzing breast cancer cell lines with tiling arrays searching for non-coding transcripts that had consistently altered expression. We chose one of the NNK-induced transcripts, NIT 5, and one of the breast cancer altered transcripts, bcNCT 28, and began to characterize them further. Here we describe our final report on the work done with these two transcripts to determine their role in breast cancer.