Project description:Prostate cancer is one of the major cancers that seriously affect men's health. The low specificity of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) for prostate cancer has resulted in the overdiagnosis and subsequent overtreatment of clinically indolent tumors. There is an urgent need for noninvasive and easy diagnostic assays to help evaluate whether a prostate biopsy is warranted. Many non-coding RNAs (eg, microRNAs, long non-coding RNAs, circular RNAs) have been reported to play key roles in prostate cancer progression, showing great potential to impact cancer diagnostics and therapies. Remarkably, exosomes secreted by cells into body fluids contain molecules that reflect the disease information, and urinary exosomes could be used to detect prostate cancer as a new type of liquid biopsies. Non-coding RNAs are enriched and stable in exosomes. We performed high-throughput sequencing on urine-derived exosomes of 11 patients with high-grade (Gleason score 7 or greater) prostate cancer and 11 patients with benign prostatic hyperplasia to screen differentially expressed non-coding RNAs.
Project description:Long non-coding RNAs show highly tissue and disease specific expression profiles. We analyzed prostate cancer and normal adjacent prostate samples to identify cancer-specific transcripts and found 334 candidates, of which 15 were validated by RT-PCR.
Project description:Vitamin D, a hormone that acts through the nuclear vitamin D receptor (VDR), upregulates anti-tumorigenic microRNA in prostate epithelium. This may contribute to the lower levels of aggressive prostate cancer (PCa) in patients with high serum vitamin D. Expression of other small non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) in prostate epithelium and their potential regulation by vitamin D are uncharacterized. Laser capture microdissection (LCM) followed by small-RNA sequencing was used to identify ncRNA in the prostate epithelium of tissues from a vitamin D-supplementation trial. We compared the expression profiles to small-RNA sequencing data from primary prostate epithelial cells and publically-available benign whole prostate. Application of LCM to isolate epithelium promoted sample homogeneity and captured more diversity in ncRNA species. An abundance of PIWI-interacting RNAs (piRNAs) was detected in normal prostate epithelium, which increased under high vitamin D conditions.
