Knockdown of nuclear-located enhancer RNAs and long ncRNAs using locked nucleic acid gapmers

Abstract

The human genome is widely transcribed outside of protein-coding genes, producing thousands of noncoding RNAs from different subfamilies including enhancer RNAs. Functional studies to determine the role of individual genes are challenging with noncoding RNAs appearing to be more difficult to knockdown than mRNAs. One factor that may have hindered progress is that the majority of noncoding RNAs are thought to be located within the nucleus, where the efficiency of traditional RNA interference techniques is debatable. Here we present an alternative RNA interference technique utilizing Locked Nucleic Acids, which is able to efficiently knockdown noncoding RNAs irrespective of intracellular location.