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DOI: 10.1055/s-0033-1343623
Molecular characterization of lineage-specific long non-coding RNAs in hematopoiesis
Long intervening non-coding RNAs (lincRNAs) play an important role in the functional regulation of the genome. We aimed to extend present collections of hematopoietic mRNA expression profiles to a non-coding RNA HemAtlas by performing microarray expression analysis of long ncRNAs from differentiated blood cell lineages. Principal component analysis, hierarchical unsupervised clustering and Pearson's correlation confirmed the quality of our data. Applying integrated bioinformatics, we determined the top 50 specifically expressed lincRNAs for each blood cell lineage. Using genome databases, we designed primers for 89 lincRNAs to validate their specific expression by qRT-PCR. For 20 lincRNA candidates, we designed shRNAs and evaluated their function in CD34+-HSPCs. Directed in vitro differentiation and colony-forming assays upon RNAi-mediated knock-down demonstrated an important regulatory function for the majority of the validated human lincRNAs. Thus, our study provides a non-coding RNA expression resource and defines blood-lineage specific lincRNA marker and regulator genes.