Identification and Characterization of Circular RNAs As a New Class of Putative Biomarkers in Human Blood

By Sebastian Memczak, Panagiotis Papavasileiou, Oliver Peters, Nikolaus Rajewsky. PLoS ONE, 2015

601 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Covalently closed circular RNA molecules (circRNAs) have recently emerged as a class of RNA isoforms with widespread and tissue specific expression across animals, oftentimes independent of the corresponding linear mRNAs. circRNAs are remarkably stable and sometimes highly expressed molecules. Here, we sequenced RNA in human peripheral whole blood to determine the potential of circRNAs as biomarkers in an easily accessible body fluid. We report the reproducible detection of thousands of circRNAs. Importantly, we observed that hundreds of circRNAs are much higher expressed than corresponding linear mRNAs. Thus, circRNA expression in human blood reveals and quantifies the activity of hundreds of coding genes not accessible by classical mRNA specific assays. Our findings suggest that circRNAs could be used as biomarker molecules in standard clinical blood samples.

Subfields: Cancer Research, Immunology, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6d71adec38ae3ba965d9f1eda3a834d55597c1da

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Citations in the corpus

• The Biogenesis, Functions, and Challenges of Circular RNAs. (2018, background): “Only a handful of circRNAs were found at that time, and they were often considered aberrant splicing byproducts with little functional potential (Capel et al., 1993; Cocquerelle et al., 1992, 1993; Nigro et al., 1991; Pasman et al., 1996).”
• Circular RNA Expression: Its Potential Regulation and Function (2016, background): “Moreover, the field has accumulated strong evidence that circRNA expression is not simply correlated with linear RNA expression from the same locus, lending further support to the hypothesis that regulation of circRNA expression is more complex than in cis alone [10,50,52].”
• Translating RNA sequencing into clinical diagnostics: opportunities and challenges (2016, background): “However, circRNAs have been found in high abundance in biofluids and tissues and have been found to be more stable than mRNAs, increasing their potential for diagnostic purposes 66 [68] [69] [70] [71] .”
• Circular RNAs: Promising Biomarkers for Human Diseases (2018, background): “Additionally, the abundance of circRNA is higher in brain compared to other organs [36]; and the population of circRNAs circulating in the blood is also very prevalent, attributed to their structure with high stability [37].”