BioMol Concepts, Vol. 3 (2012), pp. 415–428 • Copyright © by Walter de Gruyter • Berlin • Boston. DOI 10.1515/bmc-2012-0017 Review Paraspeckles: possible nuclear hubs by the RNA for the RNA Tetsuro Hirose 1, * and Shinichi Nakagawa 2 Introduction 1 Biomedicinal Information Research Center , National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, The eukaryotic cell nucleus is highly compartmentalized. 2-4-7 Aomi, Koutou 135-0064, Tokyo , Japan More than 10 membraneless subnuclear organelles have 2 RNA Biology Laboratory , RIKEN Advanced Research been identifi ed (1, 2) . These so-called nuclear bodies exist Institute, 2-1 Hirosawa, Wako 351-0198 , Japan in the interchromosomal space, where they are enriched in multiple nuclear regulatory factors, such as transcription and * Corresponding author RNA-processing factors. These factors are thought to serve e-mail:
[email protected] as specialized hubs for various nuclear events, including transcriptional regulation and RNA processing (3, 4) . Some nuclear bodies serve as sites for the biogenesis of macromo- Abstract lecular machineries, such as ribosomes and spliceosomes. Multiple cancer cell types show striking alterations in their The mammalian cell nucleus is a highly compartmental- nuclear body organization, including changes in the numbers, ized system in which multiple subnuclear structures, called shapes and sizes of certain nuclear bodies (5) . The structural nuclear bodies, exist in the nucleoplasmic spaces. Some of complexity and dynamics of nuclear bodies have been impli- the nuclear bodies contain specifi c long non-coding RNAs cated in the regulation of complex gene expression pathways (ncRNAs) as their components, and may serve as sites for in mammalian cells.