Fig. 2.

Long non-coding RNAs in Alzheimer's brain. We searched for evidence of significantly changing lncRNAs in AD subjects in the study of Bossers et al. (2010). Brains were staged according to Braak and Braak (1995) where Braak stage I represents early disease stage and Braak stage VI end stage disease. Amongst the 1071 transcripts found to be changing with statistical significance amongst seven groups of postmortem brains, we identified at least eight lncRNAs. In brief, we manually extracted likely lncRNAs from this set based on ID—those transcripts with IDs commencing in ENST/BC/AK, or with the format “C1orf1”, then submitted their sequences to the coding potential calculator (Kong et al., 2007). Transcripts scored as non-coding (CPC score <0) were then manually checked. Any transcripts overlapping protein coding gene exons on the same strand, or immediately downstream of annotated protein coding genes (and therefore potential extended UTR regions) were discarded. We then used published normalised log2 expression data (Bossers et al., 2010) to plot the lncRNA expression level.