Research progress of circular RNA FOXO3 in diseases (review)

Abstract

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are a newly discovered class of endogenous non-coding RNAs with a closed-loop structures, and they exert crucial regulatory functions in diverse biological processes and disease development through the modulation of linear RNA transcription, downstream gene expression, and protein translation, among others. Circular RNA FOXO3(circFOXO3, Hsa_circ_0006404) originates from exon 2 of the FOXO3 gene and exhibits widespread cytoplasmic expression in eukaryotic cells. It shows specific expression in different tissues or cells. Recent research has associated circFOXO3 with various diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular diseases, neurological disorders, senescence, and inflammation. However, a comprehensive review of the research progress of circFOXO3 in human diseases has not been conducted. In this paper, we provide a systematic review of the latest advances in circFOXO3 research in diseases, elucidate its biological functions and potential molecular mechanisms, and discuss the future directions and challenges in circRNAs research to provide valuable references and inspiration for research in this field.

Keywords

CircFOXO3, circRNAs / MiRNA sponge / Disease pathogenesis / Biomarkers

Ethics approval statement

Not applicable.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Linhu Ye is responsible for the conceptualization and design of the work, Min Zhao conducts a comprehensive literature review and drafts the manuscript, Minting Lin is involved in editing the manuscript, and Zhibo Zhang contributes to reviewing and revising the manuscript.

Funding

This work is supported by the Foshan “Fourteen Five” Key Medical Specialty Construction Project (FSZD145035).

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

Not applicable.

Use of artificial intelligence tools

During the preparation of this work, artificial intelligence(AI) tools were used to improve the readability and language of the manuscript. It is worth emphasising that AI is not involved in any knowledge generation and is only used to polish the language.

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