Squaring the circle: sponging microRNAs in gastric cancer

We have known for some time that the instead of transcribing the roughly 2% of the genome that encodes for proteins, our cells transcribe approximately 75% of our genome (1). That equates to an awful lot of what we now call non-coding RNA (ncRNA). ncRNA itself can be loosely separated into two classes based on size: short ncRNAs (those shorter than 200 bases), and long ncRNAs (those greater than 200 bases) (2,3).