MPRAbase a Massively Parallel Reporter Assay database

Massively parallel reporter assays (MPRAs) represent a set of high-throughput technologies that measure the functional effects of thousands of sequences/variants on gene regulatory activity. There are several different variations of MPRA technology and they are used for numerous applications, including regulatory element discovery, variant effect measurement, saturation mutagenesis, synthetic regulatory element generation or characterization of evolutionary gene regulatory differences. Despite their many designs and uses, there is no comprehensive database that incorporates the results of these experiments. To address this, we developed MPRAbase, a manually curated database that currently harbors 130 experiments, encompassing 17,718,677 elements tested across 35 cell types and 4 organisms. The MPRAbase web interface serves as a centralized user-friendly repository to examine online the activity of regulatory elements across cell types and organisms, and to download MPRA data for independent analysis.