Year: 2012
Type: dissertation
Abstract: In recent years focused research aimed at finding new specific and sensitive biomarkers for detection, classification and, monitoring of human cancers has been ongoing. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small, 19-24 nucleotides, noncoding RNAs that are stably expressed in body fluids such as blood. These circulating RNAs have shown great promise as biomarkers, because the unique expression patterns strongly correlate with certain human diseases, including various types of cancer. These miRNAs act mainly through down regulation of specific target mRNAs in the cytosol and have been shown to be key regulatory players in several important cellular processes. In this project sequence data of circulating small RNAs, 18-30 nucleotides, from blood serum were analyzed and compared to sequence data from blood cells and two blood cancer cell lines. The results showed that a surprisingly large part of the small RNAs in human serum did not match the human genome. Moreover, the results indicate the existence of several novel miRNAs in the human genome. When comparing the most frequent RNA molecules, differences between the compared samples were striking and several well described miRNAs showed up amongst these differently expressed RNAs. Despite huge progress in recent years, there are still more research needed in this field; most likely several novel miRNAs are still to be found in the human genome and, the involvement of certain miRNAs as key regulators in important cellular processes are to be expected. In some years to come, probably some miRNAs will prove to be reliable biomarkers for some specific trait.
Author: Mikael Lindberg
Language: English
Subfield: Cancer Research
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2124749090