High throughput analyses reveal that the majority of the genome is transcribed into RNAs, but less than 2% of them are translated into proteins [2][3][4][5][6]. Therefore, most transcripts are non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) [4][5][6]. In recent years, a large number of ncRNAs have been found to have regulatory functions in various physiological and pathological processes. According to their length, regulatory ncRNAs are classified into short non-coding RNAs (< 200 nt) and long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs, > 200 nt). Short noncoding RNAs include microRNAs (miRNAs), small interfering RNAs (siRNAs), and piwiRNAs (piRNAs) [4,6,7]. LncRNAs are the products of RNA polymerase II or III, and are often 5 '-capped, 3'-polyadenylated and spliced[3, 8, 9]. Based on the locations in the genome, lncRNAs are divided into antisense, sense, bidirectional, intergenic, and intronic ones [9]. Compared with mRNA, the expression of lncRNA is much lower and shows cell-and tissue-specificity [10,11]. Recently, lncRNAs have been identified as critical regulators in several biological processes including gene expression, chromatin modification, cell apoptosis, cell Xiumei Sheng