Discovery of Novel Gene Elements Associated with Prostate Cancer Progression.

摘要

Long non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) have gained recent attention as potentially important players in cancer biology. This proposal employs innovative next generation sequencing and ab initio transcriptome assembly methodologies to discover novel ncRNAs and incorporate them into expression signatures that stratify indolent versus aggressive prostate cancer. In this reporting period, we describe the identification and characterization of a prostate cancer-specific ncRNA named PCAT-1. Here, we demonstrated that PCAT-1 is a regulator of cell proliferation and is a target of the Polycomb Repressive Complex 2 (PRC2). We further found that patterns of PCAT-1 and PRC2 expression stratified patient tissues into molecular subtypes distinguished by expression signatures of PCAT-1-repressed target genes. PCAT-1 may potentially serve as a novel biomarker of aggressive disease that can be developed for clinical diagnostic and prognostic utility