Database Commons

a catalog of worldwide biological databases

Piwi-interacting RNAs are a type of small noncoding RNA that have various functions. piRBase is a manually curated resource focused on assisting piRNA functional analysis. piRBase release v3.0 is committed to providing more comprehensive piRNA related information. The latest release covers >181 million unique piRNA sequences, including 440 datasets from 44 species. More disease-related piRNAs and piRNA targets have been collected and displayed. The regulatory relationships between piRNAs and targets have been visualized. In addition to the reuse and expansion of the content in the previous version, the latest version has additional new content, including gold standard piRNA sets, piRNA clusters, piRNA variants, splicing-junction piRNAs, and piRNA expression data. In addition, the entire web interface has been redesigned to provide a better experience for users. piRBase release v3.0 is free to access, browse, search, and download at http://bigdata.ibp.ac.cn/piRBase.

PIWI-interacting RNAs are a class of small RNAs that is most abundantly expressed in animal germline. Substantial research is going on to reveal the functions of piRNAs in the epigenetic and post-transcriptional regulation of transposons and genes. To collect and annotate these data, we developed piRBase, a database assisting piRNA functional study. Since its launch in 2014, piRBase has integrated 264 data sets from 21 organisms, and the number of collected piRNAs has reached 173 million. The latest piRBase release (v2.0, 2018) was more focused on the comprehensive annotation of piRNA sequences, as well as the increasing number of piRNAs. In addition, piRBase release v2.0 also contained the potential information of piRNA targets and disease related piRNA. All datasets in piRBase is free to access, and available for browse, search and bulk downloads at http://www.regulatoryrna.org/database/piRNA/.

piRNAs are a class of small RNAs that is most abundantly expressed in the animal germ line. Presently, substantial research is going on to reveal the functions of piRNAs in the epigenetic and post-transcriptional regulation of transposons and genes. A piRNA database for collection, annotation and structuring of these data will be a valuable contribution to the field, and we have therefore developed the piRBase platform which integrates various piRNA-related high-throughput data. piRBase has the largest collection of piRNAs among existing databases, and contains at present 77 million piRNA sequences from nine organisms. Repeat-derived and gene-derived piRNAs, which possibly participate in the regulation of the corresponding elements, have been given particular attention. Furthermore, epigenetic data and reported piRNA targets were also collected. To our knowledge, this is the first piRNA database that systematically integrates epigenetic and post-transcriptional regulation data to support piRNA functional analysis. We believe that piRBase will contribute to a better understanding of the piRNA functions. Database URL: http://www.regulatoryrna.org/database/piRNA/ © The Author(s) 2014. Published by Oxford University Press.