Best Poster Awards – The Non-Coding Genome
Taking place for the third time, the EMBO|EMBL Symposium: The Non-Coding Genome (16 – 19 October 2019) brought together 305 RNA experts to discuss the roles of non-coding RNAs in both prokaryotes and eukaryotes, gene regulation and function.
A total of 189 posters were presented, from which two were singled out as the winners by popular vote.
Characterization of the genomic and splicing features of long non-coding RNAs using bioinformatics approaches
Authors: Monah Abou Alezz, Ludovica Celli, Giulia Belotti, Silvia Bione, Institute of Molecular Genetics L. L Cavalli-Sforza – National Research Council, Italy
Recent developments in deep sequencing approaches have simulated the continuous discovery of a significantly large number of novel long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) genes loci in the genomes. Long non-coding RNAs are recognized as a new class of regulatory molecules despite very little is known about their functions in the cellular processes. Due to their overall low expression level and tissue-specificity, the identification and annotation of lncRNA genes still remains challenging. The characterization of lncRNAs’ features is crucial to understand and get functional insights on their mechanisms of action. We exploited recent annotations by the GENCODE compendium to characterize the genomic and splicing features of long non-coding genes, in comparison to protein-coding ones, in the human and mouse genome by using bioinformatics approaches. Our analysis highlighted differences between the two classes of genes in terms of gene architecture regarding exons and introns length, GC-content, and the combinatorial patterns of chromatin marks and states. Moreover, significant differences in the splice sites usage were observed between long non-coding and protein-coding genes. While the frequency of non-canonical GC-AG splice junctions represents about 0.8% of total splice sites in protein-coding genes, we identified a remarkable enrichment of the GC-AG splice sites in long non-coding genes, both in human (3.0%) and mouse (1.9%). In addition, we identified peculiar characteristics of the GC-AG introns in terms of donor and acceptor splice sites strength, poly-pyrimidine tract, intron length, and a positional bias of GC-AG junctions being enriched in the first intron. Genes containing at least one GC-AG intron were found conserved in many species across large evolutionary distances, more prone to alternative splicing and a functional analysis pointed toward their enrichment in specific biological processes such as
DNA repair.
MirGeneDB 2.0: The metazoan microRNA complement
Authors: Bastian Fromm (1), Diana Domanska (2), Eirik Hoye (3), Vladimir Ovchinnikov (4), Wenjing Kang (5), Ernesto Aparicio-Puerta (6), Morten Johansen (7), Kjersti Flatmark (3), Anthony Mathelier (8), Hovig
Eivind (3), Michael Hackenberg (6), Marc Friedländer (5), Kevin Peterson (9)
Non-coding RNAs (ncRNA) have gained substantial attention due to their roles in human disorders and animal development. microRNAs (miRNAs) are unique within this class as they are the only ncRNAs with individual gene sequences conserved across the animal kingdom. Bona fide miRNAs can be clearly distinguished from the myriad small RNAs generated in cells by a set of unique criteria. Unfortunately, recognition and utilization of these clear and mechanistically well understood features is not a common practice. We addressed this by extensively expanding our curated miRNA gene database MirGeneDB to 45 organisms that represent the breadth of Metazoa. By consistently annotating and naming more than 11,000 miRNA genes in these organisms, we show that previous miRNA annotations contained not only many false positives, but surprisingly many false negatives as well. Indeed, curated miRNA complements of closely related organisms are very similar and can be used to reconstruct evolution of miRNA genes, families and biogenesis across more than 1 billion years of evolution. MirGeneDB represents a robust platform for providing deeper and more significant insights into the biology of miRNAs, possible sources of mis-regulation, and evolutionary mechanisms. MirGeneDB is publicly and freely available under http://mirgenedb.org/.
Fromm, B. et al. MirGeneDB 2.0: the metazoan microRNA complement. Nucleic Acids Research, gkz885, (2019), https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkz885
(1) Science for Life Laboratory, Sweden
(2) Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
(3) Department of Tumor Biology, Institute for Cancer Research, The Norwegian Radium Hospital, Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
(4) School of Life Sciences, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom
(5) Stockholm University, SciLifeLab, Sweden
(6) Department of Genetics, Faculty of Sciences, University of Granada, Granada, Spain
(7) Institute for Medical Informatics, The Norwegian Radium Hospital, Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
(8) Centre for Molecular Medicine Norway (NCMM), Nordic EMBL Partnership, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
(9) Department of Biological Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, United States of America
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