Association of ANRIL Gene Polymorphisms with Acute Myeloid Leukemia in an Iranian Population

Recently, in an effort to fully characterize the underlying genetic causes of the acute myeloid leukemia (AML), attention has been devoted to the newest aspect of gene expression regulations which inferred to the regulatory long none coding RNAs.
ANRIL is one of the disease associated lncRNAs which is transcribed from a critical genomic region that has an important role in the expression regulation of its neighbor genes CDKN2A and CDKN2B encoding 3 major tumor suppressor genes p14ARF, p15INK4b and p16INK4a.
Since the identified variants in the CDKN2A and CDKN2B genes or ANRIL locus are reported to be associated with tumorigenesis in different cancers, we investigate 4 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) of ANRIL in Iranian AML patients in comparison to control individuals
The results showed significant association neither for allelic and genotypic frequencies nor for haplotype blocks with AML patients versus control subjects.
With regard to the indicated roles of ANRIL in epigenetic gene expression regulation, exploring its AML-associated genetic defects or its aberrant expression in patients is still a growing area of research and further investigations may illustrate its potential to serve as a diagnostic biomarker or a therapeutic target for AML.