Evolutionary analysis across mammals reveals distinct classes of long noncoding RNAs [preprint]
Authors
Chen, JennyShishkin, Alexander A.
Zhu, Xiaopeng
Kadri, Sabah
Maza, Itay
Hanna, Jacob H.
Regev, Aviv
Garber, Manuel
UMass Chan Affiliations
Program in Molecular MedicineProgram in Bioinformatics and Integrative Biology
Document Type
PreprintPublication Date
2015-11-11Keywords
evolutionary biologyRNA
long non-coding RNAs
slncky
long noncoding RNAs
evolution
comparative genomics
molecular evolution
annotation
lincRNA
RNA-Seq
transcriptome
Amino Acids, Peptides, and Proteins
Computational Biology
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Genetic Phenomena
Nucleic Acids, Nucleotides, and Nucleosides
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
BACKGROUND: Recent advances in transcriptome sequencing have enabled the discovery of thousands of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) across multitudes of species. Though several lncRNAs have been shown to play important roles in diverse biological processes, the functions and mechanisms of most lncRNAs remain unknown. Two significant obstacles lie between transcriptome sequencing and functional characterization of lncRNAs: 1) identifying truly noncoding genes from de novo reconstructed transcriptomes, and 2) prioritizing hundreds of resulting putative lncRNAs from each sample for downstream experimental interrogation. RESULTS: We present slncky, a computational lncRNA discovery tool that produces a high-quality set of lncRNAs from RNA-Sequencing data and further prioritizes lncRNAs by characterizing selective constraint as a proxy for function. Our filtering pipeline is comparable to manual curation efforts and more sensitive than previously published approaches. Further, we develop, for the first time, a sensitive alignment pipeline for aligning lncRNA loci and propose new evolutionary metrics relevant for both sequence and transcript evolution. Our analysis reveals that selection acts in several distinct patterns, and uncovers two notable classes of lncRNAs: one showing strong purifying selection at RNA sequence and another where constraint is restricted to the regulation but not the sequence of the transcript. CONCLUSION: Our novel comparative methods for lncRNAs reveals 233 constrained lncRNAs out of tens of thousands of currently annotated transcripts, which we believe should be prioritized for further interrogation. To aid in their analysis we provide the slncky Evolution Browser as a resource for experimentalists.Source
bioRxiv 031385; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/031385. Link to preprint on bioRxiv service.
DOI
10.1101/031385Permanent Link to this Item
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14038/29342Notes
This article is a preprint. Preprints are preliminary reports of work that have not been certified by peer review.
Related Resources
Now published in Genome Biology doi: 10.1186/s13059-016-0880-9.
Rights
The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license.Distribution License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1101/031385
Scopus Count
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license.