A novel method to identify and characterize personalized functional driver lncRNAs in cancer samples

Multi-Omics Mining of lncRNAs with Biological and Clinical Relevance in Cancer

“…In this regard, although somatic point mutations and small insertions and deletions (INDELs) have been the primary focus of cancer genomic studies, copy-number alterations (CNAs) are also important forms of DNA aberrations, also referred to as somatic copy-number alterations (SCNAs), which encompass larger genomic regions and often harbor key genes involved in the development and progression of many cancers [81,82] (Figure 1). Not surprisingly, most large-scale genomic analyses conducted to date have successfully identified almost exclusively protein-coding cancer driver genes located in regions of focal amplification and deletion [83][84][85], and it is only relatively recently that the first systematic analyses have reported on the identification of lncRNAs that are also contained within focal CNAs in cancer genomes [47,[86][87][88][89]. Given the evidence that nearly three-quarters of the human genome can be transcribed to RNA [90] and that only 2% of the human transcriptional landscape codes for a protein, the need to understand the functional impact of SCNAs on lncRNAs has become clearer.…”