Carlsbad, CA. and Beltsville MD. (OBBeC) - In research demonstrating that RNA previously thought to have no biological relevance may be of use for therapeutic and diagnostic targets, Invitrogen, a provider of essential life science technologies for research, production and diagnostics, and BioServe, a provider of clinically annotated tissue samples and provider of molecular marker research services, have announced that their technologies identified noncoding RNAs that were differentially expressed in healthy and diseased tissue. These micro ribonucleic acid (miRNA) sequences were either up or down-regulated between matched samples of RNA isolated from healthy colon and colorectal cancer tissues. Data was presented in a poster at the annual meeting for the American Association for Cancer Research.

According to the announcement, Invitrogen researchers used RNA samples from BioServe's OncoRNA product line, a series of RNAs isolated from fresh-frozen, fully annotated tumour and adjacent normal tissues, to probe the NCode Human miRNA microarray V3. NCode Profiler software identified miRNAs that were either up- or down-regulated in tumour versus healthy tissue, and researchers used quantitative PCR to validate the findings.

"Using the high quality RNA samples from BioServe, we were able to identify novel microRNA sequences that could potentially be involved in the generation of new tumour tissues, particularly in colorectal cancer," said Chris Adams, research and development leader of Epigenetics at Invitrogen. "If more stringently validated, these disease-related microRNAs may eventually serve as targets for diagnostic or therapeutic development."

MicroRNAs are short RNA sequences that do not code for specific proteins but are extremely important in the regulation of gene expression; they are implicated in several disease states including cancer and heart disease. Among the activity of miRNAs is the triggering of messenger RNA (mRNA) degradation and the inhibition of protein translation - the process of assembling amino acids into proteins based on the instructions contained in mRNA sequences. Invitrogen's NCode Human miRNA microarray V3 consists of miRNA content from multiple sources, including the Sanger 10.0 miRNA database and novel miRNAs unavailable in public databases, giving users access to strong content for identification and study of miRNAs.

"MicroRNA is making headlines in drug discovery for its ability to fine tune the activity of genes and its part in the formation of cancer," said Kevin Krenitsky, chief executive officer, BioServe. "This makes it all the more critical that researchers can be certain they are working with stable, highly annotated samples collected under rigorous ethical and scientific protocols. We created OncoRNA to respond to this need, providing bench-ready RNA for tomorrow's discoveries."