Expression profiling and functional prediction of long noncoding RNAs in nasopharyngeal nonkeratinizing carcinoma

Rapidly growing evidence has shown that long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are playing more and more important roles in a variety of biological processes and have been involved in various types of cancer. How to better decode these noncoding transcripts and how to predict their potential roles in tumorigenesis particularly in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) are still open questions. In this study, we applied our custom-designed lncRNA+mRNA gene expression microarray, which contains probes against 38,141 lncRNA transcripts, to assaying the expression profiling of flash-frozen tumorous and non-tumorous tissue samples from nonkeratinizing carcinoma (NKC), which is the major histologic type of NPC. As a result, 481 differentially expressed (DE) lncRNAs (231 up-regulated and 250 down-regulated) were identified. Moreover, integrated bioinformatics analyses including gene ontology, lncRNA functional prediction based on coding-noncoding gene co-expression network, interactive miRNAs, and transcription factor binding motifs were all carried out to decode the potential functional roles of these newly identified DE-lncRNAs. This work hence offers new resource and insight into lncRNAs for further understanding the molecular mechanisms of tumorigenesis of NKC, and may also define new biomarkers or therapy targets for the translational studies of NKC.