RNAcentral

RNAcentral RNAcentral is a comprehensive database of non-coding RNA sequences

All data freely available at rnacentral.org with API access, embeddable widgets, and full database dumps. Huge thanks to all @RNAcentral Consortium members for their contributions!

As always, we welcome feedback! Please get in touch and help us make RNAcentral even better!

Major structural change: RNAcentral now groups related transcripts into gene-level entries! Using ML + graph clustering, we built 103,814 human ncRNA genes from 600,225 transcripts. Better reflects biology and enables comparative analyses.

LitSumm: large language models for literature summarization of noncoding RNAs Abstract. Curation of literature in life sciences is a growing challenge. The continued increase in the rate of publication, coupled with the relatively fi

LitSumm uses GPT-4 to generate functional summaries from scientific literature. Currently covers ~4,600 human ncRNAs prioritized by community interest. See AI-powered summaries on any sequence page! Link to LitSumm paper: doi.org/10.1093/data...

RNAcentral has grown to 45M ncRNA sequences, now includes 52 expert databases, with 10 new databases and major updates to existing sources 📈

RNAcentral in 2026: genes and literature integration Abstract. RNAcentral was founded in 2014 to serve as a comprehensive database of non-coding RNA sequences. It began by providing a single unified interface

🎉New RNAcentral paper published in @narjournal.bsky.social! Discover automated literature integration, new expert databases, gene-level entries grouping related transcripts, and more: doi.org/10.1093/nar/...

RNAcentral - Exploring non-coding RNAs RNAcentral - Exploring non-coding RNAs

We've just updated our RNAcentral Online Tutorial!
www.ebi.ac.uk/training/onl...

This tutorial provides an overview of RNAcentral and covers different ways of accessing and using the data. It's aimed at anyone with an interest in non-coding RNAs.

As always, we welcome your feedback!

RNAcentral Send your feedback about RNAcentral using a webform or submit an issue on GitHub

As always, we welcome feedback! Please get in touch and help us make RNAcentral even better! rnacentral.org/contact

Read more in our blog post: blog.rnacentral.org/2025/10/rnac... or our recent preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Gene identifiers will be stable across releases, even as new transcripts are added. Each gene gets metadata including RNA type and description from expert databases.
Find genes via text search, sequence pages, or download them in our GFF files.

We built 103,814 human ncRNA genes from 600,225 transcripts using machine learning + graph clustering. The pipeline was trained on Ensembl/GENCODE data and achieved 99.4% accuracy.
Most genes are lncRNAs (65,187), followed by antisense lncRNAs (16,790) and pre-miRNAs (8,560).

Why genes? Until now, transcripts differing by a single nucleotide were separate entries. For rRNAs, this meant thousands of nearly identical sequences with no established relationship.
Genes bring biological context and make it easier to find all variants of the same RNA.

🎉 RNAcentral Release 26 is here! This release introduces our biggest structural change yet: gene-level entries for ncRNAs across 204 organisms.
For the first time, you can explore RNA data at the gene level, not just individual sequences.
🧵👇

13/12: Co-author update! @nanonancy.bsky.social was also instrumental in helping make sure the summaries were up to scratch! Thanks Nancy!

12/12 Big thanks to our co-authors @afg781.bsky.social, @antonipetrov.bsky.social, @alexbateman1.bsky.social and others! Read the full paper here: doi.org/10.1093/data... #bioinformatics #LLM #AI

11/12 But overall, this shows that with careful prompting and checking, LLMs can help address the curation bottleneck in bioinformatics! 🎯

10/12 Some limitations: We can only use open-access papers (highlighting the importance of #OpenAccess!), and LLMs sometimes struggle with complex information synthesis.

9/12 We've also made our entire dataset of contexts and summaries available:
huggingface.co/datasets/RNA...

8/12 Want to try it yourself? Search for RNAs with summaries at:
rnacentral.org/search?q=has...

7/12 All summaries are now available through @rnacentral.bsky.social - making it easier than ever to quickly understand what we know about specific RNAs

6/12 The results? We generated >4,600 summaries covering ~28,700 RNA transcripts! Expert evaluation showed 94% were rated good or excellent quality. 📈

5/12 The key innovation is our multi-stage checking system:

Reference validation
Automated fact-checking
Self-consistency verification
This helps ensure accuracy and proper attribution.

4/12 Our solution: Use GPT-4 with carefully designed prompts to read scientific papers and generate accurate summaries, complete with proper citations! 🤖

3/12 We focused on non-coding RNAs, where the curation gap is particularly acute. Most databases lack good summaries of what each RNA does, making it harder for researchers to quickly understand their function.

2/12 Why did we build this? Curation of scientific literature is becoming increasingly challenging. There's a growing gap between publication rates and the number of available curators.

1/12 Excited to share our new paper in DATABASE on LitSumm - our system that uses large language models to automatically generate high-quality literature summaries for non-coding RNAs! 🧬📚