Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is a polymeric molecule that is essential for most biological functions, either by performing the function itself or by forming a template for the production of proteins. RNA and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) are nucleic acids. The nucleic acids constitute one of the four major macromolecules essential for all known forms of life. RNA is assembled as a chain of nucleotides. Cellular organisms use messenger RNA (mRNA) to convey genetic information that directs synthesis of specific proteins. Many viruses encode their genetic information using an RNA genome.
A non-coding RNA (ncRNA) is a functional RNA molecule that is not translated into a protein. The DNA sequence from which a functional non-coding RNA is transcribed is often called an RNA gene. Abundant and functionally important types of non-coding RNAs include transfer RNAs (tRNAs) and ribosomal RNAs (rRNAs), as well as small RNAs such as microRNAs, siRNAs, piRNAs, snoRNAs, snRNAs, exRNAs, scaRNAs and the long ncRNAs such as Xist and HOTAIR.
Transfer RNA is an adaptor molecule composed of RNA, typically 76 to 90 nucleotides in length. In a cell, it provides the physical link between the genetic code in messenger RNA (mRNA) and the amino acid sequence of proteins, carrying the correct sequence of amino acids to be combined by the protein-synthesizing machinery, the ribosome. Each three-nucleotide codon in mRNA is complemented by a three-nucleotide anticodon in tRNA. As such, tRNAs are a necessary component of translation, the biological synthesis of new proteins in accordance with the genetic code.
Rfam is a database containing information about non-coding RNA (ncRNA) families and other structured RNA elements. It is an annotated, open access database originally developed at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in collaboration with Janelia Farm, and currently hosted at the European Bioinformatics Institute. Rfam is designed to be similar to the Pfam database for annotating protein families.
In molecular biology, the small nucleolar RNAs SNORD106 and SNORD12 are two related snoRNAs which belongs to the C/D class of small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs). Both contain the conserved C (UGAUGA) and D (CUGA) box sequence motifs
Long non-coding RNAs are a type of RNA, generally defined as transcripts more than 200 nucleotides that are not translated into protein. This arbitrary limit distinguishes long ncRNAs from small non-coding RNAs, such as microRNAs (miRNAs), small interfering RNAs (siRNAs), Piwi-interacting RNAs (piRNAs), small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs), and other short RNAs. Given that some lncRNAs have been reported to have the potential to encode small proteins or micro-peptides, the latest definition of lncRNA is a class of RNA molecules of over 200 nucleotides that have no or limited coding capacity. Long intervening/intergenic noncoding RNAs (lincRNAs) are sequences of lncRNA which do not overlap protein-coding genes.
Bacterial small RNAs are small RNAs produced by bacteria; they are 50- to 500-nucleotide non-coding RNA molecules, highly structured and containing several stem-loops. Numerous sRNAs have been identified using both computational analysis and laboratory-based techniques such as Northern blotting, microarrays and RNA-Seq in a number of bacterial species including Escherichia coli, the model pathogen Salmonella, the nitrogen-fixing alphaproteobacterium Sinorhizobium meliloti, marine cyanobacteria, Francisella tularensis, Streptococcus pyogenes, the pathogen Staphylococcus aureus, and the plant pathogen Xanthomonas oryzae pathovar oryzae. Bacterial sRNAs affect how genes are expressed within bacterial cells via interaction with mRNA or protein, and thus can affect a variety of bacterial functions like metabolism, virulence, environmental stress response, and structure.
In bioinformatics, miRBase is a biological database that acts as an archive of microRNA sequences and annotations. As of September 2010 it contained information about 15,172 microRNAs. This number has risen to 38,589 by March 2018. The miRBase registry provides a centralised system for assigning new names to microRNA genes.
This microRNA database and microRNA targets databases is a compilation of databases and web portals and servers used for microRNAs and their targets. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) represent an important class of small non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) that regulate gene expression by targeting messenger RNAs.
Degradome sequencing (Degradome-Seq), also referred to as parallel analysis of RNA ends (PARE), is a modified version of 5'-Rapid Amplification of cDNA Ends (RACE) using high-throughput, deep sequencing methods such as Illumina's SBS technology. The degradome encompasses the entire set of proteases that are expressed at a specific time in a given biological material, including tissues, cells, organisms, and biofluids. Thus, sequencing this degradome offers a method for studying and researching the process of RNA degradation. This process is used to identify and quantify RNA degradation products, or fragments, present in any given biological sample. This approach allows for the systematic identification of targets of RNA decay and provides insight into the dynamics of transcriptional and post-transcriptional gene regulation.
tRNADB is a curated database of transfer RNA (tRNA). As of 2008 it contained over twelve thousand entries.
In the fields of geometry and biochemistry, a triple helix is a set of three congruent geometrical helices with the same axis, differing by a translation along the axis. This means that each of the helices keeps the same distance from the central axis. As with a single helix, a triple helix may be characterized by its pitch, diameter, and handedness. Examples of triple helices include triplex DNA, triplex RNA, the collagen helix, and collagen-like proteins.
The NONCODE database is a collection of expression and functional lncRNA data obtained from re-annotated microarray studies.
Alexander George Bateman is a computational biologist and Head of Protein Sequence Resources at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Cambridge, UK. He has led the development of the Pfam biological database and introduced the Rfam database of RNA families. He has also been involved in the use of Wikipedia for community-based annotation of biological databases.
Model organism databases (MODs) are biological databases, or knowledgebases, dedicated to the provision of in-depth biological data for intensively studied model organisms. MODs allow researchers to easily find background information on large sets of genes, plan experiments efficiently, combine their data with existing knowledge, and construct novel hypotheses. They allow users to analyse results and interpret datasets, and the data they generate are increasingly used to describe less well studied species. Where possible, MODs share common approaches to collect and represent biological information. For example, all MODs use the Gene Ontology (GO) to describe functions, processes and cellular locations of specific gene products. Projects also exist to enable software sharing for curation, visualization and querying between different MODs. Organismal diversity and varying user requirements however mean that MODs are often required to customize capture, display, and provision of data.
DIMPL is a bioinformatic pipeline that enables the extraction and selection of bacterial GC-rich intergenic regions (IGRs) that are enriched for structured non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs). The method of enriching bacterial IGRs for ncRNA motif discovery was first reported for a study in "Genome-wide discovery of structured noncoding RNAs in bacteria".
