The sRNA Workbench

RNA沉默是一种复杂和高度保守的调控机制，目前已知参与多种过程，如发育、病原菌控制、基因组维持和对环境变化的响应。自最近发现以来，RNA沉默已经成为植物和动物分子生物学中一个快速发展的研究领域，具有重要的意义。它的发现不仅是我们了解活细胞复杂调控过程的重大突破，也为人类疾病的新疗法的发展打开了大门。2006年因发现RNA干扰而获得诺贝尔医学奖，突显了这些发现的重要性。小RNA分子(SRNA)在RNA沉默机制中起着至关重要的作用，因为它们可以与其他核酸以序列特异的方式相互作用，将它们标记为失活的目标。为了更多地了解这一机制及其影响，研究人员利用尖端测序技术从许多生物体获得了大量的sRNA序列数据集(通常在100-1000万个序列之间，长度约为20-30个核苷酸)。随着这些技术变得更容易获得和负担得起，现在有可能获得多个大规模数据集，从而能够分析SRNA人口的变化。这些变化可以表明RNA沉默途径参与了感兴趣的生物过程，如调节生物体的关键发育阶段。然而，缺乏分析这类实验的软件工具，这是这项技术开发的主要瓶颈，特别是对于没有直接生物信息学支持的生物学家来说。在这个项目中，我们将建立在我们现有的公开可用的SRNA分析软件工具的基础上，目的是提供一个易于使用、可下载的工作台，为动植物SRNA数据集的分析提供完整的解决方案。这将为生物学家提供急需的资源，以识别新的sRNA及其作为湿实验室研究的一部分的功能。

RNA silencing is a complex and highly conserved regulatory mechanism that is now known to be involved in diverse processes such as development, pathogen control, genome maintenance and response to environmental change. Since its recent discovery, RNA silencing has become a fast moving area of research of great importance in both plant and animal molecular biology. Its discovery has not only been a major breakthrough for our understanding of complex regulatory processes in living cells, but has also opened the door to the development of novel therapeutics for human diseases. The importance of these findings was highlighted by the award of the Nobel prize for medicine in 2006 for the discovery of RNA interference. Small RNA molecules (sRNAs) play a crucial role in the RNA silencing machinery in that they can interact with other nucleic acids in a sequence specific manner to mark them as targets for inactivation. To learn more about this mechanism and its implications, researchers employ cutting-edge sequencing technologies to obtain large datasets of sRNA sequences (typically between 1-10 million sequences about 20-30 nucleotides in length) from a number of organisms. With these technologies becoming more accessible and affordable it is now possible to obtain multiple large-scale data sets which allow the analysis of changes in the sRNA population. These changes can indicate the involvement of RNA silencing pathways in the biological process of interest, such as regulation of key developmental stages in an organism. However, there is a lack of software tools for the analysis of such experiments, which presents a major bottleneck to the exploitation of the technology, especially for biologists without direct bioinformatics support. In this project, we will build on our existing publicly available software tools for sRNA analysis, with the aim of providing an easy to use, downloadable workbench to provide a complete solution for the analysis of plant and animal sRNA datasets. This will provide biologists with a much needed resource to identify novel sRNAs and their function as part of wet-lab studies.