Long noncoding RNA-mediated activation of androgen receptor in prostate cancer

Remarkable progress has been made in molecular characterization of prostate cancer (PCa) with continued innovations in high throughput technologies evaluating human cancer.^1,2,3 Since the completion of the Human Genome Project it has been estimated that only about 1.5%-2% of our genome codes for proteins. Various genome-wide approaches, e.g. the ENCODE project, revealed that a much larger percent of the genome is transcribed as non-protein coding (nc) RNA, including long noncoding (lnc) RNA (over 200 bps long). Although the biological roles of lncRNA (the 'dark matter of the genome') are not nearly as well-understood as the protein coding mRNAs, it is increasingly clear that they play important roles in almost every aspects of biology, including cancer biology.^4,5 This is exemplified by recent genome-wide association studies revealing that over 80% of cancer-associated single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are in noncoding regions of the genome.