Almost half of cancer patients experience cachexia syndrome. Cachexic patients are at risk of increased side effects of chemotherapy, reduced tolerance to chemotherapy drugs, longer duration of treatment period, and decreased quality of life. Cancer cachexia is a multifactorial syndrome. Micro ribonucleic acid (miRNA), a “non-coding RNA”, is considered to be a risk factor of cachexia and muscle...

Given the importance of microRNAs (miRNAs) in modulating brain functions and their implications in neurocognitive disorders there are currently significant efforts devoted in the field of miRNA-based therapeutics to correct and/or to treat these brain diseases. The observation that miRNA 29a/b-1 cluster, miRNA 10b and miRNA 7, for instance, are frequently deregulated in the brains of patients w...

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small regulatory molecules that repress the translational processes of their target genes by binding to their 3' untranslated regions (3' UTRs). Because the target genes are predominantly determined by their sequence complementarity to the miRNA seed regions (nucleotides 2-7) which are evolutionarily conserved, it is inferred that the target relationships and functions of...

MicroRNA (miRNA) is a type of short-length (~22 nt) non-coding RNA. Most miRNAs are transcribed by RNA polymerase II and processed by Drosha-DGCR8 and Dicer complexes in the cropping and dicing steps, respectively. miRNAs are exported by exportin-5 from the nucleus to the cytoplasm after cropping. Trimmed mature miRNA is loaded and targets mRNA at the 3' or 5' untranslated region (UTR) by recog...

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) must be phenotypically and genetically characterized before they can be utilized in clinical applications. Here, we present the first protocol for the detection of miRNAs in CTCs using in situ hybridization (ISH) combined with immunomagnetic selection based on cytokeratin (CK) expression and immunocytochemistry. Locked-Nucleic Acid (LNA) probes associated with an ...

MicroRNAs (miRNA) regulate many genes critical for tumorigenesis. We profiled miRNAs from 11 normal breast tissues, 17 noninvasive, 151 invasive breast carcinomas, and 6 cell lines by in-house-developed barcoded Solexa sequencing. miRNAs were organized in genomic clusters representing promoter-controlled miRNA expression and sequence families representing seed sequence-dependent miRNA target re...

Our previous study described a real-time PCR method to quantify microRNA (miRNA) precursors using SYBR green detection [T. D. Schmittgen, J. Jiang, Q. Liu and L. Yang (2004) Nucleic Acids Res., 32, e43]. The present study adapted the assay to a 384-well format and expanded it to include primers to 222 human miRNA precursors. TaqMan minor groove binder probes were used to discriminate nearly ide...

BACKGROUND Metazoan miRNAs regulate protein-coding genes by binding the 3' UTR of cognate mRNAs. Identifying targets for the 115 known C. elegans miRNAs is essential for understanding their function. RESULTS By using a new version of PicTar and sequence alignments of three nematodes, we predict that miRNAs regulate at least 10% of C. elegans genes through conserved interactions. We have devel...

Lin28A and Lin28B selectively block the expression of let-7 microRNAs and function as oncogenes in a variety of human cancers. Lin28A recruits a TUTase (Zcchc11/TUT4) to let-7 precursors to block processing by Dicer in the cell cytoplasm. Here we find that unlike Lin28A, Lin28B represses let-7 processing through a Zcchc11-independent mechanism. Lin28B functions in the nucleus by sequestering pr...