NTU Undergraduates' research April 2014 - Biosciences | Page 10

Detection of MALAT-1 in the rodent brain.
Sarah France
The Nottingham Trent University
Abstract
MALAT-1 is a long, not frequently spliced, non-coding RNA (Hutchinson et al, 2007). Although its
function remains unknown, MALAT-1 has been found to be highly conversed throughout evolution
(Hutchinson et al, 2007) which suggests that there is functional value of the non-coding RNA
otherwise it would have been lost over time due to having no beneficial function. There have been
many links made between MALAT-1 and the metastasis of different cancers (Gutschner et al, 2013),
specifically non small cell lung cancer (Ji et al, 2003), and also in cell motility, gene expression and
possibly synaptogenesis (Bernard et al, 2010). Radioactive in-situ hybridisation was used to detect
the presence and determine the location of MALAT-1 within the brain of a rodent (rattus
norvegicus). The results of the in-situ hybridisation showed that the probe had bound and displayed
a signal widely across the brain section; it could be argued that this means that the probe used in the
experiment was not specific enough, however the fact that MALAT-1 is expressed in the nucleus of
cells (Hutchinson et al, 2007) and highly in the brain suggests that this was the expected result. In
the results, the probe signal for MALAT-1 was strongest within the hippocampus and in lobes of the
cerebellum, which agrees with research by Bernard et al (2010) which also found levels of MALAT-1
to be elevated within these regions. The results give supporting evidence for the claim that MALAT-1
is involved in synaptogenesis, as it is found in areas with a high density of neurons, and so also gives
support for the claim that it is involved in gene expression via an involvement in alternative splicing
and being associated with SC35 splicing domains which overlap nuclear speckles where MALAT-1 is
enriched (Hutchinson 2007).