Diverse functions of nuclear non-coding RNAs in eukaryotic gene expression

Recent genome-wide analyses revealed that eukaryotic genomes are almost entirely transcribed, generating a large number of short or long non-protein coding RNAs (non-coding RNAs; ncRNAs). Rapidly accumulating experimental evidence suggests that ncRNAs are not just transcriptional noise, but have biological roles in gene expression. In this review, we focus on the functions of nuclear-localized ncRNAs including the spliceosomal small nuclear...