ENSURE: the encyclopedia of suppressor tRNA with an AI assistant

Suppressor transfer RNAs (sup-tRNAs) offer a promising strategy for rescuing proteins truncated by premature termination codons via translational readthrough. Despite recent advances in genetic code expansion and RNA therapeutics that have facilitated sup-tRNA engineering, progress remains constrained by the lack of a dedicated, integrative data platform. Here, we present ENSURE (https://trna.lumoxuan.cn/), a comprehensive knowledge base that aggregates 2152 disease- and cancer-associated nonsense, missense, and frameshift variants; 86 experimentally validated natural sup-tRNAs, 1108 tRNA engineering strategies; and 487 curated tRNA element records. All sequences undergo multiple sequence alignment, secondary structure prediction, and AlphaFold 3 modeling accompanied by interactive 2D/3D visualization. ENSURE supports keyword and BLAST searches, as well as bulk downloads. A key feature is an AI assistant based on a retrieval-augmented generation architecture: ~123.7k tokens of database pages, literature abstracts, structural annotations, and other resources are chunked and encoded with Sentence-BERT; user queries are processed similarly, matched to relevant chunks, concatenated with the query, and passed to a large language model to generate answers with illustrative resources inserted automatically. By combining curated data, structural models, and an interactive AI assistant, ENSURE provides a powerful platform to accelerate sup-tRNA research and translational applications.

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Publication Details

Journal
Nucleic Acids Research
Published
2025-10-01
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkaf1062
Citations
1
Primary Topic
RNA modifications and cancer
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.81

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article

ENSURE: the encyclopedia of suppressor tRNA with an AI assistant

Wenkai Teng, Yang Sun, Liang‐Hu Qu, Zhao‐Rong Lun et al.
1 citations
Nucleic Acids Research
RNA modifications and cancer
0.81
article

ENSURE: the encyclopedia of suppressor tRNA with an AI assistant

Wenkai Teng, Yang Sun, Liang‐Hu Qu, Zhao‐Rong Lun, Z. Ouyang, Xiaoning Bu, Ling‐Ling Zheng, Yan‐Zi Wen, Xiao Feng, Xudong Zeng, Yifeng Zhang, Bin Li, Yu Kong, Qiong Wu, Abdul Hafeez, Fan Feng
article en
1 citations

Abstract

Suppressor transfer RNAs (sup-tRNAs) offer a promising strategy for rescuing proteins truncated by premature termination codons via translational readthrough. Despite recent advances in genetic code expansion and RNA therapeutics that have facilitated sup-tRNA engineering, progress remains constrained by the lack of a dedicated, integrative data platform. Here, we present ENSURE (https://trna.lumoxuan.cn/), a comprehensive knowledge base that aggregates 2152 disease- and cancer-associated nonsense, missense, and frameshift variants; 86 experimentally validated natural sup-tRNAs, 1108 tRNA engineering strategies; and 487 curated tRNA element records. All sequences undergo multiple sequence alignment, secondary structure prediction, and AlphaFold 3 modeling accompanied by interactive 2D/3D visualization. ENSURE supports keyword and BLAST searches, as well as bulk downloads. A key feature is an AI assistant based on a retrieval-augmented generation architecture: ~123.7k tokens of database pages, literature abstracts, structural annotations, and other resources are chunked and encoded with Sentence-BERT; user queries are processed similarly, matched to relevant chunks, concatenated with the query, and passed to a large language model to generate answers with illustrative resources inserted automatically. By combining curated data, structural models, and an interactive AI assistant, ENSURE provides a powerful platform to accelerate sup-tRNA research and translational applications.

Nucleic Acids ResearchVol. 54(D1)
Sun Yat-sen University (CN), Center for Life Sciences (CN)
National Supercomputer Centre in Guangzhou, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Sun Yat-sen University, Ostravská Univerzita v Ostravě
Openalex Percentile: Top 22%
RNA modifications and cancer
0.81
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