Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) also regulate transcription of RNA and may be important in AUD. lncRNAs represent the most abundant class of ncRNAs in brain (Jia et al., 2010), and compared to the approximately 20,000 protein-coding genes in humans (Carninci and Hayashizaki, 2007; Jia et al., 2010; Ravasi et al., 2006), annotations indicate that there are > 16,000 lncRNAs, the majority of which show tissue-and temporal-specific expression in the CNS (Derrien et al., 2012). lncRNAs are critical for normal cellular function, including the regulation of gene expression (Wang and Chang, 2011), cell proliferation and differentiation (Guttman et al., 2011), as well as the pathophysiology of disease (Wapinski and Chang, 2011). Similar to protein-coding transcripts, localization of individual lncRNAs is brain-region specific (Belgard et al., 2011; Mercer et al., 2008). The expression of lncRNAs was shown to be dynamically regulated in human alcoholic brain (Farris et al., 2015a). In the prefrontal cortex of human alcoholics, an alcohol-responsive gene module contained multiple lncRNAs, such as NCRNA00092, NCRNA00174, and NCRNA00284 (Farris et al., 2015a; Farris and Mayfield, 2014), suggesting a potential role for lncRNAs in AUD.
