Editorial: Exploring circular RNAs and their applications within health and disease

Abstract

Editorial on the Research Topic Exploring circular RNAs and their applications within health and diseaseThe most recent advances in next-generation sequencing technologies have indicated that only 1.5% of the RNA transcribed from DNA is translated into protein. Circular RNAs (circRNA) are new non-coding RNA characterized by the presence of a covalent bond linking the 3′and 5′ends that have recently been identified in multiple cell types from diverse species. CircRNAs are generated via back-splicing or exon skipping of pre-mRNAs, a complex process regulated by intronic repeats and RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) that differs from canonical splicing (Ebbesen et al., 2016). CircRNAs have been described in various subcellular fractions (nucleus, cytoplasm, exosome), and are more stable than their linear ncRNA counterparts, because their structures are not affected by RNA exonuclease RNase R (Robinson and Port, 2022).Although the functions of most circRNAs are not fully elucidated, emerging evidence demonstrate that dysregulated circRNAs play a key role in many biological processes as regulatory non-coding RNAs, by acting as microRNAs sponges, modulating splicing, transcription, chromatin modification, regulating RNA-binding proteins, as well as encoding proteins (Zhou et al., 2022). Their great stability, functional properties, and the presence in the circulation, make circRNAs not only a potential target but also therapeutic agents. This Research Topic collects some latest circRNAs diagnostic and therapeutic advances and their use in precision medicine and biomarker discovery and validation.Accumulating evidence indicates that circRNAs are differentially expressed in cancer cells, and their dysfunctions are involved in tumorigenesis and metastasis; for this reason, they are promising cancer biomarkers. In this Research Topic, two review articles summarize the most up to date studies that analyze biogenesis, degradation and biological functions of circRNAs, as well as the potential clinical implications in renal cell carcinoma (Zhou et al.) and non-small cell lung cancer (Huang et al.). The identification of new biomarkers is essential for cancer drug development and therapeutic decision-making for individual patients, that translate the genomic information of individual tumors into a personalized therapeutic approaches. In this regard, Kong and collaborators investigated the tumor suppressor role of circLRRC7 in glioblastoma (Kong et al.). In this original article, through bioinformatic analysis followed by experimental validation, authors found that circLRRC7 was downregulated in glioblastoma

Identification of circRNA-miRNA-mRNA network in luminal breast cancers by integrated analysis of microarray datasets

“…Growing evidence has validated the ceRNA function of circRNAs in cancers (Becatti et al, 2023). For instance, circularLRRC7 can exert as a potential glioblastoma suppressor by functioning as ceRNA for miR-1281 (Kong et al, 2021).…”