LNCipedia 5: towards a reference set of human long non-coding RNAs

Abstract

While long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) research in the past has primarily focused on the discovery of novel genes, today it has shifted towards functional annotation of this large class of genes. With thousands of lncRNA studies published every year, the current challenge lies in keeping track of which lncRNAs are functionally described. This is further complicated by the fact that lncRNA nomenclature is not straightforward and lncRNA annotation is scattered across different resources with their own quality metrics and definition of a lncRNA. To overcome this issue, large scale curation and annotation is needed. Here, we present the fifth release of the human lncRNA database LNCipedia (https://lncipedia.org). The most notable improvements include manual literature curation of 2482 lncRNA articles and the use of official gene symbols when available. In addition, an improved filtering pipeline results in a higher quality reference lncRNA gene set.