Our results contrast with a recent study that concluded that lincRNAs act in cis, based on the observation that knockdown of 7 out of 12 lincRNAs affected expression of a gene within 300 kb11. The explanation appears to be that the threshold in the previous study failed to account for multiple hypothesis testing within the local region. Accounting for this, the effects on neighbouring genes are no greater than expected by chance and are consistent with our observations here (see Methods).
