Fig. 1

Selected major mechanisms of action of long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs). a LncRNA may function as a sponge or a competing endogenous RNA (ceRNA) [14] for specific miRNAs to consequently nullify the silencing of target mRNAs by those miRNAs. b LncRNAs may act as hosts of, and hence be processed into, small RNAs including miRNAs, to promote silencing of the target mRNAs. c LncRNAs could assemble a set of proteins to enable a biological event such as suppression or activation of genes or forming nuclear subcompartments (including paraspeckles) by serving as an architectural scaffold. d Signal lncRNAs can facilitate the recruitment of proteins into a particular part of the genome for further modification. e LncRNA may entrap proteins, such as histone modifying enzymes or transcription factors to block their binding to the specific part of the genome and hence indirectly affect the expression of those proteins’ target genes. f Selected lncRNAs may encode micropeptides with regulatory roles in the cells [7, 15]. Created with BioRender.com