Posttranscriptional Regulation and RNA Binding Proteins in Cancer Biology
1Institute of Molecular Genetics, National Research Council (IGM-CNR), Pavia, Italy
2Susan Lehman Cullman Laboratory for Cancer Research, Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy, Middlesex County, NJ, USA
3Departamento de Genética Humana, Instituto Nacional de Saúde Doutor Ricardo Jorge, Lisbon, Portugal
4Department of Movement, Human, and Health Sciences, Foro Italico University of Rome, Laboratory of Cellular and Molecular Neurobiology, (CERC) Fondazione Santa Lucia, Rome, Italy
Posttranscriptional Regulation and RNA Binding Proteins in Cancer Biology
Description
In order to support tumor growth, invasion, and metastasis, cancer cells rapidly and efficiently affect the expression and the functions of their proteome through a variety of mechanism, including the regulation of posttranscriptional events, such as pre-mRNA splicing, modifications of mRNA stability and/or translational efficiency, RNA editing, and noncoding RNAs.
RNA binding proteins (RBPs) play a pivotal role in these processes and they are aberrantly expressed in several tumor types. Moreover, each RBP regulates hundreds of targets at the same time, thus leading to important consequences for cancer cell biology. A thorough understanding of the role of posttranscriptional regulation and RBPs in tumorigenesis will lead to a better comprehension of the molecular events that trigger malignant transformation and will contribute to the development of more selective and effective anticancer therapies.
We invite authors to contribute original research articles as well as review articles that will illustrate and stimulate the continuing effort to understand the implication of posttranscriptional regulation of gene expression in cancer and to exploit manipulation of the function of selected RBPs or noncoding RNAs as diagnostic/predictive biomarkers or potential targets for the development of innovative therapeutic strategies.
Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
- Recent discoveries of the roles of posttranscriptional regulation in cancer
- Functional characterization of RBPs and noncoding RNAs aberrantly expressed in tumor tissues
- Identification and functional description of new RNA targets (and regulatory elements) of RBPs involved in tumor initiation, maintenance, or the development of resistance to treatments
- Posttranscriptional regulation events and RBPs as targets in anticancer therapies
- Bioinformatics approaches to characterize the regulatory networks formed by RNA binding proteins and their target RNAs in aspects of cancer cell biology