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.
Authors
- Wenkai Teng (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3954-2205)
- Yang Sun (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1464-016X)
- Liang‐Hu Qu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3657-2863)
- Zhao‐Rong Lun (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9603-5379)
- Z. Ouyang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4600-6171)
- Xiaoning Bu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-8899-0409)
- Ling‐Ling Zheng (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7152-1095)
- Yan‐Zi Wen
- Xiao Feng (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8919-6000)
- Xudong Zeng (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2236-3801)
- Yifeng Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2832-2277)
- Bin Li (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5717-1551)
- Yu Kong (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-5169-5483)
- Qiong Wu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3305-6652)
- Abdul Hafeez (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-9494-7480)
- Fan Feng (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7743-8735)
Institutions
- Sun Yat-sen University (CN)
- Center for Life Sciences (CN)
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
Funders
- National Supercomputer Centre in Guangzhou
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- Sun Yat-sen University
- Ostravská Univerzita v Ostravě