Focally amplified lnc RNA genes in cancer

Genomic instability could lead to the aberration of genes and partially be the cause of carcinogenesis. Researches of cancer drivers are mainly focused on protein-coding genes, especially those are harbored in the genomic regions with high frequent somatic copy-number alterations (SCNAs) in cancer. The protein-coding sequences only took up less than 2 % of the whole human genome, although, nearly 30 % was affected by SCNAs, leaving behind many “gene desert ” altered regions in cancer genome. Recent findings revealed that noncoding RNAs made up the vast majority of transcribed RNAs. Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) were defined as RNA transcripts without protein-coding function and with a length of more than 200 nucleotides. LncRNAs can be cell-type and tissue-specific, and the expression wa