Human skin specific long noncoding RNA HOXC13-AS regulates keratinocyte differentiation by inferfering with Golgi-ER retrograde transport

In an RNAseq analysis, we have identified the HOXC13-AS significantly downregulated in wound biopsies and epidermal cells compared to skin counterparts. To study the genes regulated by HOXC13-AS, we transfected HOXC13-AS siRNA pool into human primary epidermal keratinocytes to knockdown HOXC13-AS and induced cell differentiation for 3 days by 1.5 mM calcium. We performed a global transcriptome analysis of keratinocytes upon the HOXC13-AS knockdown using Affymetrix arrays. Gene expression profiling of differentiated keratinocytes transfected with either siRNA control (n = 3) or si-HOXC13-AS (n = 3) was carried out by using human Clariom™ S assay (ThermoFisher Scientific) at the Bioinformatics and Expression Analysis (BEA) core facility at Karolinska Institutet.