Database Commons

a catalog of worldwide biological databases

While long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) research in the past has primarily focused on the discovery of novel genes, today it has shifted towards functional annotation of this large class of genes. With thousands of lncRNA studies published every year, the current challenge lies in keeping track of which lncRNAs are functionally described. This is further complicated by the fact that lncRNA nomenclature is not straightforward and lncRNA annotation is scattered across different resources with their own quality metrics and definition of a lncRNA. To overcome this issue, large scale curation and annotation is needed. Here, we present the fifth release of the human lncRNA database LNCipedia (https://lncipedia.org). The most notable improvements include manual literature curation of 2482 lncRNA articles and the use of official gene symbols when available. In addition, an improved filtering pipeline results in a higher quality reference lncRNA gene set.

Here, we present LNCipedia (http://www.lncipedia.org), a novel database for human long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) transcripts and genes. LncRNAs constitute a large and diverse class of non-coding RNA genes. Although several lncRNAs have been functionally annotated, the majority remains to be characterized. Different high-throughput methods to identify new lncRNAs (including RNA sequencing and annotation of chromatin-state maps) have been applied in various studies resulting in multiple unrelated lncRNA data sets. LNCipedia offers 21 488 annotated human lncRNA transcripts obtained from different sources. In addition to basic transcript information and gene structure, several statistics are determined for each entry in the database, such as secondary structure information, protein coding potential and microRNA binding sites. Our analyses suggest that, much like microRNAs, many lncRNAs have a significant secondary structure, in-line with their presumed association with proteins or protein complexes. Available literature on specific lncRNAs is linked, and users or authors can submit articles through a web interface. Protein coding potential is assessed by two different prediction algorithms: Coding Potential Calculator and HMMER. In addition, a novel strategy has been integrated for detecting potentially coding lncRNAs by automatically re-analysing the large body of publicly available mass spectrometry data in the PRIDE database. LNCipedia is publicly available and allows users to query and download lncRNA sequences and structures based on different search criteria. The database may serve as a resource to initiate small- and large-scale lncRNA studies. As an example, the LNCipedia content was used to develop a custom microarray for expression profiling of all available lncRNAs.