Circular RNAs (circRNAs), a novel class of long noncoding RNAs, are characterized by a covalently closed continuous loop without 5' or 3' polarities structure and have been widely found in thousands of lives including plants, animals and human beings. Utilizing the high-throughput RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) technology, recent findings have indicated thata great deal of circRNAs, which are endogenous, stable, widely expressed in mammalian cells, often exhibit cell type-specific, tissue-specific or developmental-stage-specific expression. Evidences are arising that some circRNAs might regulate microRNA (miRNA) function as microRNA sponges and play a significant role in transcriptional control. circRNAs associate with related miRNAs and the circRNA-miRNA axes are involved in a serious of disease pathways such as apoptosis, vascularization, invasion and metastasis. In this review, we generalize and analyse the aspects including synthesis, characteristics, classification, and several regulatory functions of circRNAs and highlight the association between circRNAs dysregulation by circRNA-miRNA-mRNA axis and sorts of diseases including cancer- related and non-cancer diseases."
Keywords: back-splicing; circular RNA; microRNA sponge; tumorgenesis.