Microarrays Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Microarrays, including details on experiments, designs, statistics, analysis, software.

Profiling Caenorhabditis elegans non-coding RNA expression with a combined microarray.

He H, Cai L, Skogerbø G, Deng W, Liu T, Zhu X, Wang Y, Jia D, Zhang Z, Tao Y, Zeng H, Aftab MN, Cui Y, Liu G, Chen R

Bioinformatics Laboratory, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.

Small non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) are encoded by genes that function at the RNA level, and several hundred ncRNAs have been identified in various organisms. Here we describe an analysis of the small non-coding transcriptome of Caenorhabditis elegans, microRNAs excepted. As a substantial fraction of the ncRNAs is located in introns of protein-coding genes in C.elegans, we also analysed the relationship between ncRNA and host gene expression. To this end, we designed a combined microarray, which included probes against ncRNA as well as host gene mRNA transcripts. The microarray revealed pronounced differences in expression profiles, even among ncRNAs with housekeeping functions (e.g. snRNAs and snoRNAs), indicating distinct developmental regulation and stage-specific functions of a number of novel transcripts. Analysis of ncRNA-host mRNA relations showed that the expression of intronic ncRNA loci with conserved upstream motifs was not correlated to (and much higher than) expression levels of their host genes. Even promoter-less intronic ncRNA loci, though showing a clear correlation to host gene expression, appeared to have a surprising amount of 'expressional freedom', depending on host gene function. Taken together, our microarray analysis presents a more complete and detailed picture of a non-coding transcriptome than hitherto has been presented for any other multicellular organism.

Published 1 June 2006 in Nucleic Acids Res, 34(10): 2976-83.
Full-text of this article is available online (may require subscription).

© 2004-2008 Microarrays Research Today. All Rights Reserved.