Long Noncoding RNAs Regulate Osteoblast Function and Bone Formation

Long noncoding (lnc) RNAs play an essential role on bone formation. Increasing evidences have proved that lncRNAs may be adopted as potential therapeutic targets for osteoporosis. However, some problems still exist in the study of osteogenic lncRNAs. The screening of lncRNAs related to osteogenic differentiation has been proved expensive and low efficient, the functional study of the lncRNA in vivo was very hard to establish, it was difficult to study mechanism of lncRNAs, and the low homology of lncRNAs between different species made lncRNA study hard to be used as therapeutic targets for osteoporosis. This chapter will briefly summarize the defects in lncRNA today, and describe how we solve this problem of lncRNAs in our previous studies. We have developed some methods that would significantly enhance the efficiency and reduce the cost of lncRNA researches. We hope these methods would make osteogenic lncRNA study simplified and thus made osteogenic lncRNAs closer to a therapeutic target for osteoporosis.