LncRNAs and CircRNAs as Strategies against Pathological Conditions Caused by a Hypoxic/Anoxic State

Abstract

Brain damage can be induced by oxygen deprivation. It is known that hypoxic or anoxic conditions can lead to changes in the expression levels of non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs), which, in turn, can be related to Central Nervous System (CNS) injuries. Therefore, it could be useful to investigate the involvement of non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs), as well as the underlying mechanisms which are able to modulate them in brain damage induced by hypoxic or anoxic conditions. In this review, we focused on recent research that associates these conditions with long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) and circular RNAs (circRNAs). The results of this review demonstrate that the expression of both lncRNAs and circRNAs can be influenced by oxygen deprivation conditions and so they can contribute to inducing damage or providing neuroprotection by affecting specific molecular pathways. Furthermore, several experimental studies have shown that ncRNA activity can be regulated by compounds, thus also modifying their transcriptomic profile and their effects on CNS damages induced by hypoxic/anoxic events.

Keywords: CircRNAs; HIBD (hypoxic ischemic brain damage); LncRNAs; anoxic brain damage; hypoxic brain damage.

Figure 1

PRISMA flow diagram illustrating the selection methodology of the studies used to draft the review. Duplicate articles were excluded from the total number of studies recorded. Instead, articles evaluating the involvement of long noncoding RNAs and circular RNAs in hypoxic/anoxic brain damage were selected. The PRISMA Statement is published in [46].

Figure 2

This image illustrates the action mechanism and involvement of lncRNAs in hypoxic/anoxic conditions. The red line represents the inhibition symbol, while the blue line represents the activation symbol. ↑: increase; ↓: decrease [63,64,65,66,67,68,69,70,71,72,73,74,75,76,77,78,79,80,81,82,83,84,85,86,87,88,89,90,91,92,93,94,95,96,97,98,99,100].

Figure 3

LncRNAs and CircRNAs affected from anoxic/hypoxic conditions. The green rectangle contains the LncRNAs and CircRNAs that improve hypoxic/anoxic conditions; the red rectangle contains the LncRNAs and CircRNAs that worsen hypoxic/anoxic conditions.