Related Experiment Video
Updated: Oct 27, 2025

Detection of Retrotransposition Activity of Hot LINE-1s by Long-Distance Inverse PCR
Published on: July 27, 2019
Research and application on LINE-1 in diagnosis and treatment of tumorigenesis
Yan-Ni Kou1, Shan Cen1, Xiao-Yu Li1
1Department of Immunology, Institute of Medicinal Biotechnology, Chinese academy of Medical Sciences & Peking Union Medical College, Beijing 100050, China.
Abstract:
Long interspersed element-1 (LINE-1), which is the only autonomous retrotransposon in human genome, makes up about 17% of the human genome. For LINE-1 retrotransposition may result in genome instability, it was strictly restricted by organisms, and its expression was therefore barely detected in normal somatic cells. However, the expression of LINE-1 is a common phenomenon in most tumor or cancer tissues, suggesting a close relationship between LINE-1 expression and cancer development. Differentially expressed LINE-1 in cancer tissues can be used as a biomarker for tumor diagnosis and an important indicator of prognosis after cancer therapeutics. Meanwhile, the feasibility of LINE-1 as a potential drug target for tumor treatment has also been evaluating and verifying in clinicals. In this review, we introduce the application of LINE-1 as a biomarker in tumor diagnosis and prognostic, as well as the research progress in LINE-1 as potential drug target for tumor treatment, in order to provide some references for clinical application in cancer treatment.
Related Concept Videos
What is Cancer?
Although people have known about cancer for centuries, it was only in 1761 that Giovanni Morgagni of Padua performed a detailed autopsy of...
Tumor Progression
Colon cancer is one of the best-documented examples of tumor progression. Early mutation in the APC gene in colon cells causes a small growth on the colon wall called a polyp. With time, this polyp grows into a benign, pre-cancerous tumor. Further...
Non-LTR Retrotransposons
Cancer

