RNAcentral in 2026: genes and literature integration

Nucleic Acids Res. 2026 Jan 6;54(D1):D303-D313. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkaf1329.

ABSTRACT

RNAcentral was founded in 2014 to serve as a comprehensive database of non-coding RNA sequences. It began by providing a single unified interface to more specialized resources and now contains 45 million sequences. It has grown beyond providing a single interface to many specialized resources and now provides several services and analyses. These include secondary structure prediction with R2DT, sequence search, and analysis with Rfam. Since its last publication in 2021, RNAcentral has developed two major features. First, literature integration with the development of LitScan and LitSumm. LitScan automatically identifies and links relevant publications to RNA entries, while LitSumm uses natural language processing to generate functional summaries from the literature. Together, these tools address the critical challenge of connecting sequence data with scattered functional knowledge across thousands of publications. Second, RNAcentral has created gene-level entries. Gene-level entries represent a large structural change to RNAcentral. While RNAcentral previously organized data exclusively at the sequence level, we now group related transcripts into gene-centric views. This allows researchers to explore all isoforms, splice variants, and related sequences for a gene in a unified interface, better reflecting biological organization and facilitating comparative analyses. RNAcentral is freely available at https://rnacentral.org.

PMID:41404707 | PMC:PMC12807676 | DOI:10.1093/nar/gkaf1329