HOTAIR and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: Candidates were chosen from those that had been previously described in in vitro and in silico studies of ALS (such as Malat1 and Neat1) [24,29,34,42–45], as well as those that had been reported to be involved in other neurodegenerative diseases (namely Meg3, Hotair, Gas5, Xist, Snhg1, Snhg16 and Pvt1) [46–49].