We next evaluated whether lincRNAs are conserved. It has been observed that lincRNAs can contain conserved motifs tethered together by nonconserved sequence [25], [31], [32]. Therefore, we evaluated lincRNA conservation using a scanning 50 bp window (Figure 3C, Figure S6, and Table S4). Consistent with prior studies, lincRNAs display detectable but modest conservation [16], [19]. We applied this same method to known functional human lincRNAs and found that the majority of the lincRNAs identified in this study display a level of conservation consistent with known functional lincRNAs (Figure 3C).
