Different roles of circular RNAs with protein coding potentials.

Circular RNAs are a class of recently identified long non-coding RNAs. Various experiments reveled that they are covalently closed molecules and are resistant to attack by exonucleases. These RNA molecules are linked to various diseases. Interestingly, though they belong to the class of non-coding RNAs, some of them are experimentally verified to code for protein products. Till date there are no reports regarding the structural aspects of the protein products from these circular RNA molecules. In this work, an attempt has been made to analyze the structural details of the proteins obtained from the circular RNA molecules. Only those circular RNAs were selected for which there was direct experimental evidences of generation of protein products. The work for the first time elucidates the molecular details of the protein products obtained from circular RNA molecules.