Research

Recently, researchers from the Beijing Institute of Genomics of Chinese Academy of Sciences (China National Center for Bioinformation) have constructed an updated resource of human long non-coding RNAs(lncRNAs)—LncBook 2.0. This work was published with the title “LncBook 2.0: integrating human long non-coding RNAs with multi-omics annotations” in the journal Nucleic Acid Research.

 

LncBook, officially released in 2019, features comprehensive integration of human lncRNAs and systematic annotation with multi-omics data analysis. Aiming to integrate newly reported lncRNAs and characterize lncRNAs from multiple omics levels and more biological contexts, the research group developed an updated version, LncBook 2.0, which has been significantly upgraded, expanded and enhanced.

 

LncBook 2.0 accommodates a high-quality collection of 95,243 lncRNA genes(including 9,632 new genes) and 323,950 transcripts(including 119,722 new transcripts), and updates gene structure for 21,305 lncRNA genes. It characterizes conservation features of human lncRNA genes by determing their homologous sequences/genes as well as the gene ages across 40 species. Compared with the previous version, expression and DNA methylation profiles are enriched with more biological contexts, and lncRNA-miRNA interactions are predicted with more tools. In addition, disease/trait-associated variants, lncRNA encoded small proteins, lncRNA-protein interactions are included in the new version. 

 

LncBook 2.0 is a gene-centric resource with user-friendly web interfaces for searching, browsing, visualizing, analyzing and downloading. It also provides useful online tools, such as ID conversion across different databases and sequences search with BLAST. It is committed to providing the list of high-quality functional evidences from many different aspects, and thus enables users to decipher functional significance of lncRNAs in different biological contexts.