We are pleased to announce RNAcentral release 25, which features a major update to the Rfam, update TarBase to v9 and improvements to LitScan.
Welcome Rfam 15.0
Last year, Rfam underwent a major update to release 15.0, you can read more about in this blog post or with our NAR article. This produced a major growth in the number of sequences, with Rfam growing from 1,879,595 to 5,902,604 unique sequences in this release. This release comes with updated genomes used in Rfamseq and updated full sequence data for all Rfam families!
Tarbase updated to version 9
Tarbase produces, curates and delivers high-quality experimentally supported miRNA targets on protein-coding transcripts. In our latest release, Tarbase has been updated to the latest version 9, which includes a six-fold increase in the number of miRNA-gene interactions compared to the previous version. Click here to browse all TarBase sequences.
LitScan updates
Litscan has been updated to scan 13,631,547 ids across 1,273,544 papers. We are testing a new addition to LitScan to filter out false-positive articles that are unrelated to ncRNA. In our evaluations, this significantly reduced the number of articles identified where ncRNA was not the main focus of the work, particularly for identifiers that are common words. We hope you will see an improvement in the articles presented on the literature tab.
Database updates
These databases were updated in this release to the version stated below:
ENA 2024-02-20 -> 2025-03-06
Ensembl 111 -> 113
Ensembl Fungi 58 -> 60
Ensembl Metazoa 58 -> 60
Ensembl Plants 58 -> 60
Ensembl Protists 58 -> 60
Ensembl/GENCODE human 45/mouse M25 -> human 47/mouse M34
Expression Atlas 2023-10-19 -> 2025-04-01
FlyBase FB2024_01 -> FB2025_01
GeneCards 5.19 -> 5.23
HGNC 2024-02-20 -> 2025-03-06
IntAct 2024-02-20 -> 2024-11-05
MalaCards 5.19 -> 5.23
MirGeneDB 3.0
PDBe 2024-02-20 -> 2024-11-05
PomBase 2024-02-20 -> 2024-11-05
QuickGo 2024-11-05
RefSeq 223 -> 2025-03-06
Rfam 14.10 -> 15.0
SGD 2024-02-20 -> 2025-03-06
SRPDB 2024-02-20 -> 2025-03-06
TarBase v7 -> v9
WormBase 2024-02-20 -> 2025-03-06
ZFIN 2024-02-20 -> 2024-11-05
lncRNAdb 223 -> 223
Sequence Search
Our sequence search tool is still in the process of being updated. While we don’t expect this will cause any problems, there may be some temporary capacity issues. This update should be completed soon, and the service will return to full functionality.
Get in touch
As always, all data are freely available on the RNAcentral website, via the API, our public database, and in the FTP archive. If you have any feedback, please get in touch by email, on Twitter, or by submitting an issue on GitHub. We look forward to hearing from you!