Long non-coding RNA H19: a new avenue for RNA therapeutics in cardiac hypertrophy?
Abstract
This editorial refers to ‘Targeting muscle-enriched long non-coding RNA H19 reverses pathological cardiac hypertrophy’†, by J. Viereck et al., on page 3462. Molecular biology has advanced with progressively larger leaps and bounds over the last 20 years. It is now increasingly common knowledge that only a small percentage of the genome is actually dedicated to the encoding of protein; >95%, instead, functions in the transcription of non-protein coding (nc)RNAs.1 Species such as microRNAs and long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs), ranging from ∼22 nucleotides in length to >200 nucleotides long, respectively, have been shown to be critical regulators of a vast number of biological processes. Unfortunately, despite progress in the high-throughput, genome-wide methods for the sequencing of these RNAs and the development of the bioinformatics approaches that have led to the identification of tens of thousands of presumptive ncRNAs,2 it remains a complex task to determine what their functions are and how they interact in intricate regulatory networks with proteins, epigenetic enzymes, and other non-infrastructural RNAs.3 Indeed, in the field of cardiovascular biology, the regulation of developmental and pathophysiological processes involving epigenetic mechanisms remains largely unknown. Although several studies have started to shed light on various epigenetic mechanisms, including ncRNAs4 , 5 and RNA methylation,6 these mechanisms still remain to be fully elucidated. Cardiac hypertrophy…
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