Chromatin signature reveals over a thousand highly conserved large non-coding RNAs in mammals.

ABSTRACT: There is growing recognition that mammalian cells produce many thousands of large intergenic transcripts. However, the functional significance of these transcripts has been particularly controversial. Although there are some well-characterized examples, most (>95%) show little evidence of evolutionary conservation and have been suggested to represent transcriptional noise. Here we report a new approach to identifying large non-coding RNAs using chromatin-state maps to discover discrete transcriptional units intervening known protein-coding loci. Our approach identified approximately 1,600 large multi-exonic RNAs across four mouse cell types. In sharp contrast to previous collections, these large intervening non-coding RNAs (lincRNAs) show strong purifying selection in their genomic loci, e

SUBMITTER: Guttman M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2754849 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature