Endogenous microRNA sponges: evidence and controversy

By Daniel W. Thomson, Marcel E. Dinger. Nature reviews genetics, 2016

1,905 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The competitive endogenous RNA (ceRNA) hypothesis proposes that transcripts with shared microRNA (miRNA) binding sites compete for post-transcriptional control. This hypothesis has gained substantial attention as a unifying function for long non-coding RNAs, pseudogene transcripts and circular RNAs, as well as an alternative function for messenger RNAs. Empirical evidence supporting the hypothesis is accumulating but not without attracting scepticism. Recent studies that model transcriptome-wide binding-site abundance suggest that physiological changes in expression of most individual transcripts will not compromise miRNA activity. In this Review, we critically evaluate the evidence for and against the ceRNA hypothesis to assess the impact of endogenous miRNA-sponge interactions.

Subfields: Cancer Research, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0cd20a63a8ef7a8a1a36e8385834eedae66348c5

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Citations in the corpus

Transcriptional and Post-transcriptional Gene Regulation by Long Non-coding RNA (2017, background): “Thomson and Dinger argue that while the ceRNA hypothesis is attractive because it could provide an explanation of the functions for so many uncharacterised transcripts, its biological relevance may be limited [51].”
Mechanisms and Functions of Long Non-Coding RNAs at Multiple Regulatory Levels (2019, background): “This mode of action is called “miRNA sponging”, and lncRNAs with this function are called competitive endogenous RNAs (ceRNAs) [62].”
Comprehensive Molecular Characterization of Muscle-Invasive Bladder Cancer. (2017, positive): “The RPM filtering acknowledged that miRNAs that are more abundant are more likely to be influential (Mullokandov et al., 2012; Thomson and Dinger, 2016).”
Circular RNA: metabolism, functions and interactions with proteins (2020, background): “Plenty of studies have confirmed that circRNAs exert biological functions by acting as ceRNAs or miR sponges [73, 74].”
Circular RNAs: Promising Biomarkers for Human Diseases (2018, background): “Although sponge effect is a classical model of circRNA-mediated gene regulation, some recent studies have revealed that only few circRNAs exhibit properties of miRNA sponges and physiological ceRNA expression changes do not have impact on highly expressed miRNAs [20,21].”
Long Non-Coding RNA in the Pathogenesis of Cancers (2019, background): “There is a type of competitive endogenous RNA (ceRNA) that can indirectly regulate the expression of target genes via competitively binding with miRNAs; this competitive binding of miRNAs is also called microRNA sponges [37,38].”