Significance of Long Noncoding RNAs in Regenerative Medicine

Abstract

Stem cells are considered as the promising candidates to regenerate damaged tissues. A number of clinical trials have encouraged the researchers and clinicians to use stem cells especially mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) due to its several unique properties. These cells, in addition to multilinage differentiation potential and high proliferation capacity, exert paracrine effects via the release of exosomes and microvesicles which are known as the main mediators of cell to cell communication (Figure 1). The concept that lncRNAs might be paracrine or even endocrine effectors, is based on the evidence that they can transport via extracellular vesicles (EVs), i.e. exosomes and microvesicles (MVs) between cells, either within a surrounding tissue or remotely by entering into blood (1, 2). It has been shown that the EVs may contain mRNA, noncoding RNA (microRNA, LncRNA, and etc) and sometimes even DNA, in addition to lipids and proteins; secreting from the stem cells and having the capacity to alter the phenotype and cell fate of neighboring cells to restore injury tissues/organs (2, 3). Recently, Wang et al. have investigated the expression profiles of lncRNAs