Ricerc@Sapienza

In recent years, circular RNAs (circRNAs) - a novel class of RNA molecules characterized by their covalently closed circular structure - have emerged as a complex family of eukaryotic transcripts with important biological features. Besides their peculiar structure, which makes them particularly stable molecules, they have attracted much interest because their expression is strongly tissue and cell specific. Moreover, many circRNAs are conserved across eukaryotes, localized in particular subcellular compartments, and can play disparate molecular functions.

In 1957, Francis Crick speculated that RNA, beyond its protein-coding capacity, could have its own function. Decade after decade this theory was dramatically boosted by the discovery of new classes of noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs), including long noncoding (lnc)RNAs and circular (circ)RNAs, which play a fundamental role in the fine spatio-temporal control of multiple layers of gene expression. Recently, many of these molecules have been identified in a plethora of different tissues and they have emerged to be more cell type specific than protein coding genes.