title: Splicing noncoding RNAs from the inside out.
abstract: Eukaryotic precursor-messenger RNAs (pre-mRNAs) undergo splicing to remove intragenic regions (introns) and ligate expressed regions (exons) together. Unlike exons in the mature messenger RNAs (mRNAs) that are used for translation, introns that are spliced out of pre-mRNAs were generally believed to lack function and to be degraded. However, recent studies have revealed that a large group of spliced introns can escape complete degradation and are processed to generate noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs), including different types of small RNAs, long-noncoding RNAs, and circular RNAs. Strikingly, exonic sequences can be also back-spliced from pre-mRNAs to form stable circular RNAs. Together, the findings that ncRNAs can be spliced out of mRNA precursors not only expand the ever-growing repertoire of ncRNAs that originate from different genomic regions, but also reveal the unexpected transcriptomic complexity and functional capacity of eukaryotic genomes.
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Computational Biology, CAS-MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology; CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China.|School of Life Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, China.
authors.forename: Li
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Yang
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D005091:Exons; D006801:Humans; D007438:Introns; D012326:RNA Splicing; D022661:RNA, Untranslated
chemical_list: D022661:RNA, Untranslated