NaRaDa: A Comprehensive Database Dedicated to Nascent RNA

Recently, the team led by Dr. BAO Xichen at the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, Chinese Academy of Sciences, published an article in The Innovation Life titled “NaRaDa: A comprehensive nascent RNA database.” They introduced NaRaDa (http://www.narada.bio), a comprehensive database of nascent RNA.

Dynamic analysis of genomic transcriptional regulation is critical for understanding cell fate and disease mechanisms. Traditional RNA sequencing technologies, limited by the dominance of high-abundance steady-state RNA, struggle to capture real-time transcriptional changes. The advent of nascent RNA sequencing technologies has provided a powerful tool to monitor transcriptional dynamics, offering insights into three key aspects: instantaneous nascent RNA expression, transcriptional pausing, and the activity of non-coding transcriptional regulatory elements.

The research team compiled 3,664 nascent RNA sequencing datasets, covering 22 species and 415 studies, to construct the NaRaDa database. It includes sample quality control information, enabling users to filter high-quality datasets. NaRaDa identifies 558,574 transcriptional regulatory elements, allowing users to explore genes of interest or filter projects based on specific treatments or experimental conditions to retrieve corresponding transcriptional regulatory elements. The database supports online analysis of transcriptional regulation changes across nascent RNA datasets, including differential expression, RNA polymerase pause/release transitions, and activity changes in transcriptional regulatory elements. Users can download and utilize this data to deeply analyze the transcriptional dynamics of genes and transcriptional regulatory elements under various conditions.

In summary, NaRaDa provides a valuable resource for studying transcriptional initiation, RNA metabolic dynamics, and gene regulatory networks.

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China and the National Natural Science Foundation of China, among other funding agencies.

Contacts:

BAO Xichen, Ph.D., Principal Investigator; 

Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou, China, 510530. 

Email: bao_xichen@gibh.ac.cn