HOXD-AS1 lncRNA upregulates in breast cancer tumoral tissues

Breast cancer is one of the most lethal malignancies among women in the world. It is a heterogeneous disease with multiple histological types, pathological characteristics and different genes involved in which make it difficult to manage clinically. So, determining biomarkers for diagnosis and prognosis of this cancer is important. Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are transcripts with more than 200bp in length that do not code any protein. They are an important category of RNAs involved in many important biological processes including cancer. One of the most novel lncRNAs that have been reported in cancer progression is HOXD-AS1 (HOXD cluster antisense RNA 1). Here we aimed at evaluation of HOXD-AS1 expression in breast cancer. Total RNA was extracted from fifty-two pairs of specimens, breast tumor tissues and their marginal normal ones, using RNX-plus reagent and cDNA was synthesized by PrimeScriptTM RT reagent kit(Takara). Expression of HOXD-AS1 lncRNA was evaluated by qRT-PCR. GAPDH was used as internal control gene. The relative expression of HOXD-AS1 showed significantly overexpression in tumoral tissues compared to the paired non-tumoral samples (fold change: 2.859, p-value: 0.00). Moreover, our findings showed that there was not any statistical significant correlation between clinical-pathological features of tumors and expression level of HOXD-AS1. In conclusion, HOXD-AS1 might be considered as a potential breast cancer biomarker. However, more studies with a high number of specimens is needed to make sure.

Keywords:

breast cancer , lncRNA , HOXD-AS1 , qRT-PCR