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Copyright ©The Author(s) 2015. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastroenterol. Nov 7, 2015; 21(41): 11709-11739
Published online Nov 7, 2015. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v21.i41.11709
Non-coding landscapes of colorectal cancer
Marco Ragusa, Cristina Barbagallo, Luisa Statello, Angelo Giuseppe Condorelli, Rosalia Battaglia, Lucia Tamburello, Davide Barbagallo, Cinzia Di Pietro, Michele Purrello
Marco Ragusa, Cristina Barbagallo, Luisa Statello, Angelo Giuseppe Condorelli, Rosalia Battaglia, Lucia Tamburello, Davide Barbagallo, Cinzia Di Pietro, Michele Purrello, BioMolecular, Genome and Complex Systems BioMedicine Unit (BMGS) - Section of Biology and Genetics G Sichel, Department of BioMedical Sciences and BioTechnology, University of Catania, 95123 Catania, Italy
Author contributions: All authors analyzed the literature and wrote the manuscript.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors have no conflict of interest to report.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Marco Ragusa, PhD, BioMolecular, Genome and Complex Systems BioMedicine Unit (BMGS) - Section of Biology and Genetics G Sichel, Department of BioMedical Sciences and BioTechnology, University of Catania, Via Santa Sofia 87, 95123 Catania, Italy. mragusa@unict.it
Telephone: +39-095-3782089 Fax: +39-095-3782073
Received: May 28, 2015
Peer-review started: June 1, 2015
First decision: June 23, 2015
Revised: July 28, 2015
Accepted: September 30, 2015
Article in press: September 30, 2015
Published online: November 7, 2015
Processing time: 158 Days and 18.7 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: For many decades the predominant view of molecular functioning of organisms stated that proteins represent the main regulators of genomes and their dysfunctions were the first cause of diseases. This protein-centred view was too simplistic to explain the complexity of cancer. In the last few years many studies have revealed that about 85% of our genome is pervasively transcribed, mainly as non-protein-coding RNAs (ncRNAs). The discovery of countless molecular alterations of ncRNAs related to cancer changed the paradigms of cancer biology. In this review, we report recent advances in the discovery of ncRNAs involved in Colorectal Cancer pathobiologies, and their potential applications in diagnosis, prognosis and therapy.