Background: Cervical cancer is the third most common disease and the fourth leading cause of death in female’s worldwide. Treatment of this disease is successful when detection is at early neoplasic stages. Hence, multiple efforts have been pursued for early detection of cervical neoplasia. The aim of this study was to analyze the differential expression of mitochondrial non-coding RNAs or ncRNA (sense and antisense) in normal and neoplastic cervical biopsies as a potential tool for diagnostic of cervical cancer.
Methods: The expression pattern of the sense and the antisense mitochondrial ncRNAs in cervical biopsies was carried out by chromogenic in situ hybridization (ISH). We examined 17 normal cervical tissues, 108 early and late neoplasias and 24 invasive cervical carcinomas. The hybridization results were compared with the diagnostic of each specimen carried out by pathologists.
Results: Like normal human keratinocytes, normal cervical epithelium expresses the sense and the antisense mitochondrial ncRNAs at the basal layer of the epithelium. Interestingly, ISH reveals that the antisense transcripts are always localized in the nucleus of basal cells in normal cervical epithelium. Early and late cervical intraepithelial neoplasia as well as invasive cervical carcinoma expresses the sense transcript. In contrast, the antisense transcripts are down-regulated in early and late neoplasia and in invasive cervical carcinoma.
Conclusions: This pilot study indicates that down-regulation of the antisense mitochondrial transcripts at early stages of cervical neoplasia can be explored as a diagnostic tool for early cervical neoplasia.
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