Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by the selective loss of spinal motor neurons (MNs) and concomitant muscle weakness. Mutation of SMN1 is known to cause SMA, and restoring SMN protein levels via antisense …
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a neurodegenerative disease that causes progressive paralysis that is lethal and incurable to date. In this article, we discovered a developmentally critical microRNA cluster, _mir-17~92_, plays a role in the vulnerability of spinal motor neurons and supplementing this microRNA cluster can prolong the life expectancy in a mouse disease model.
In this article, we demonstrated that a long non-coding RNA, _Meg3_, is required to establish the boundary between two genes that mark spinal motor neurons from different body segments. To suppress the expression of caudal genes from expressing in rostral segments, _Meg3_ forms a complex with PRC2 to suppress them, the catalytic complex that marks histone with repressive modificication H3K27me3.