ADMIN Feb 20, 2019
Long non-coding RNAs (LncRNA) have a variety of functions in many important biological processes and are closely associated with various diseases. Although the number of known human lncRNAs has dramatically increased, they are poorly annotated, posing great challenges for better understanding their functional significance and elucidating their complex functioning molecular mechanisms.
Recently, a curated knowledgebase of human lncRNAs―LncBook, was released by BIG Data Center, Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). This work has been published online in Nucleic Acids Research on October 17, 2018.
LncBook features a comprehensive collection of human lncRNAs and systematic curation of lncRNAs by multi-omics data integration, functional annotation and disease association.
The current implementation of LncBook houses a large number of 270,044 lncRNAs and includes 1,867 featured lncRNAs with 3,762 lncRNA-function associations. It also integrates an abundance of multi-omics data from expression, methylation, genome variation and lncRNA-miRNA interaction.
In addition, LncBook includes 3,772 experimentally validated lncRNA-disease associations and identifies a total of 97,998 lncRNAs that are putatively disease-associated. Equally important, LncBook organizes all relevant data in a structured manner, facilitating data browse/search with more enhanced efficiency, and provides several useful tools for online analysis.
Collectively, LncBook is dedicated to the integration and curation of human lncRNAs as well as their associated data and thus bears great promise to serve as a valuable knowledgebase for worldwide research communities.
This work is collaborated with Prof. Vladimir Bajic of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), and is supported by CAS Strategic Priority Research Program, National Key Research and Development Program of China, the 13th Five-year Informatization Plan of CAS, CAS International Partnership Program, National Natural Science Foundation of China, KAUST.
Workflow diagram of lncRNA curation and integration (Image by Big Data Center)