MicroRNA已知通过与一个目标信使RNA（mRNA）中的不完全互补序列相互作用来调控基因表达。但真实情况是否相反呢？即mRNA表达是否会影响微RNA的分布呢？一项新的研究表明，一个假基因（肿瘤抑制因子假基因PTENP1）的3'未翻译区域(UTR)能与相关的蛋白编码基因PTEN结合相同的微RNA。
这表明，假基因具有一个作为“诱饵”的生物功能：螯合MicroRNA，从而影响它们对所表达的基因的调控。（生物谷Bioon.net）
生物谷推荐最新肿瘤会议：第一届上海肿瘤基础和转化医学前沿研讨会，2010
http://www.canceraisa.com/
生物谷推荐原文出处：
Nature doi:10.1038/nature09144
A coding-independent function of gene and pseudogene mRNAs regulates tumour biology
Laura Poliseno,Leonardo Salmena,Jiangwen Zhang,Brett Carver,William J. Haveman& Pier Paolo Pandolfi
The canonical role of messenger RNA (mRNA) is to deliver protein-coding information to sites of protein synthesis. However, given that microRNAs bind to RNAs, we hypothesized that RNAs could possess a regulatory role that relies on their ability to compete for microRNA binding, independently of their protein-coding function. As a model for the protein-coding-independent role of RNAs, we describe the functional relationship between the mRNAs produced by the PTEN tumour suppressor gene and its pseudogene PTENP1 and the critical consequences of this interaction. We find that PTENP1 is biologically active as it can regulate cellular levels of PTEN and exert a growth-suppressive role. We also show that the PTENP1 locus is selectively lost in human cancer. We extended our analysis to other cancer-related genes that possess pseudogenes, such as oncogenic KRAS. We also demonstrate that the transcripts of protein-coding genes such as PTEN are biologically active. These findings attribute a novel biological role to expressed pseudogenes, as they can regulate coding gene expression, and reveal a non-coding function for mRNAs.
