Abstract:
Chemotherapy is one of the main therapeutic strategies used for gastrointestinal tract adenocarcinomas (GTAs),
but resistance to anticancer drugs is a substantial obstacle in successful chemotherapy. Accumulating evidence
shows that non-coding RNAs, especially long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) and microRNAs (miRNAs), can affect
the drug resistance of tumor cells by forming a ceRNA regulatory network with mRNAs. The efficiency of the
competing endogenous RNAs (ceRNAs) network can be affected by the number and integrality of miRNA re-
cognition elements (MREs). Dynamic factors such as RNA editing, alternative splicing, single nucleotide poly-
morphism (SNP), RNA-binding proteins and RNA secondary structure can influence the MRE activity, which may
in turn be involved in the regulation of chemoresistance-associated ceRNA network by prospective approaches.
Besides activities in a single tumor cell, the components of the tumor micoenvironment (TME) also affect the
ceRNA network by regulating the expression of non-coding RNA directly or indirectly. The alternation of the
ceRNA network often has an impact on the malignant phenotype of tumor including chemoresistance. In this
review, we focused on how MRE-associated dynamic factors and components of TME affected the ceRNA net-
work and speculated the potential association of ceRNA network with chemoresistance. We also summarized the
ceRNA network of lncRNAs, miRNAs, and mRNAs which efficiently triggers chemoresistance in the specific types
of GTAs and analyzed the role of each RNA as a “promoter” or “suppressor” of chemoresistance.
