RNAcentral in 2026: genes and literature integration
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.
Authors
- Stavros Diamantakis (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0273-3406)
- Sam Griffiths‐Jones (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6043-807X)
- Shunmin He (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7294-0865)
- Janusz M. Bujnicki (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6633-165X)
- Marcell Szikszai (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0672-8222)
- Maria Chuvochina (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3977-6012)
- Steven J Marygold (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2759-266X)
- Sri Devan Appasamy (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6609-3535)
- Ruth C. Lovering (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9791-0064)
- Kalpana Panneerselvam (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2534-198X)
- Carlos Eduardo Ribas (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9572-273X)
- Robin R. Gutell (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5919-0801)
- Todd M. Lowe (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3253-6021)
- Helen Attrill (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3212-6364)
- Pedro Madrigal (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1959-8199)
- Anton I. Petrov (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7279-2682)
- Lin Huang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3753-7894)
- Ruth L. Seal (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7545-6817)
- Christina Ernst (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3569-2209)
- Blake Sweeney (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6497-2883)
- Elspeth A. Bruford (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8380-5247)
- Kim Rutherford (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6277-726X)
- Philippa Muston
- Mark Quinton-Tulloch (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5713-0736)
- Jan Gerken (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3005-7185)
- Sameer Velankar (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8439-5964)
- Kevin J. Peterson (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6780-0964)
- Zhichao Miao (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5777-9815)
- Cheong Xin Chan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3729-8176)
- Bastian Fromm (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0352-3037)
- Elena Rivas (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2084-269X)
- Valerie Wood (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6330-7526)
- Holly McCann (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3308-0329)
- Marcin Magnus (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5232-2234)
- Colman O’Cathail (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0151-0657)
- Doron Lancet (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5424-1393)
- Nancy Ontiveros‐Palacios (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8457-4455)
- Tatiana A Gurbich (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7537-8871)
- Henning Hermjakob (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8479-0262)
- Anton S. Petrov (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3359-7299)
- Guy Cochrane (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7954-7057)
- Niv Dobzinski (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1106-8118)
- Patricia P. Chan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0810-1642)
- Michelle S. Scott (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6231-7714)
- Kelly P. Williams (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2606-9562)
- Ernesto Picardi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6549-0114)
- Marco Mesiti (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5701-0080)
- Emanuele Cavalleri (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1973-5712)
- Peng Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9303-1639)
- Andrew Green (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1077-7417)
- ROBERT FINN (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8626-2148)
- Sudakshina Ganguly (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5452-6591)
- Lingyun Zhao
- Danny Bergeron (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7808-1603)
- Dominik Sordyl
- Isaac Jandalala
Publication Details
- Journal
- Nucleic Acids Research
- Published
- 2025-12-17
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkaf1329
- Citations
- 6
- Primary Topic
- RNA and protein synthesis mechanisms
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 4.84
Funders
- National Science Foundation
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- Wellcome Trust
- European Bioinformatics Institute
- Nuclear Safety and Security Commission
- Directorate for Biological Sciences
- Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council