RESEARCH Open Access

sequencing reveals thousands of novel long non-coding RNAs in B cell lymphoma Akanksha Verma1,2,4, Yanwen Jiang1,2,3,4, Wei Du1,2,4, Lauren Fairchild1,2,4, Ari Melnick3 and Olivier Elemento1,2,4* Background: Gene profiling of diffuse large B cell lymphoma (DLBCL) has revealed broad gene expression deregulation compared to normal B cells. While many studies have interrogated well known and annotated genes in DLBCL, none have yet performed a systematic analysis to uncover novel unannotated long non-coding RNAs (lncRNA) in DLBCL. In this study we sought to uncover these lncRNAs by examining RNA-seq data from primary DLBCL tumors and performed supporting analysis to identify potential role of these lncRNAs in DLBCL. Methods: We performed a systematic analysis of novel lncRNAs from the poly-adenylated transcriptome of 116 primary DLBCL samples. RNA-seq data were processed using de novo transcript assembly pipeline to discover novel lncRNAs in DLBCL. Systematic functional, mutational, cross-species, and co-expression analyses using numerous bioinformatics tools and statistical analysis were performed to characterize these novel lncRNAs. Results: We identified 2,632 novel, multi-exonic lncRNAs expressed in more than one tumor, two-thirds of which ar