RNAcentral Release 28
We are pleased to announce RNAcentral Release 28, which now contains more than 58 million sequences, an increase of approximately 3 million sequences since the previous release.
In this release we have focused on improving the release pipeline for both speed and correctness, with an aim to increase the number of releases happening within the year matching other major database cycles.
Notably, piRBase has been updated to v3.0 which includes curated gold standard sets. This import more than doubles the number of piRNA sequences and increases species coverage from 17 to 26. NONCODE and MGI were updated for the first time in several years leading to the addition of nearly 400,000 new lncRNA sequences and doubling the number of mouse sequences annotated by MGI. SILVA was also updated which adds over 2 million new small-subunit rRNA sequences.
Database updates
These databases were updated in this release to the version stated below:
ENA: 2026-05-15 -> 2026-09-17
WormBase 2026-05-15 -> 2026-09-17
Ensembl: 115 -> 116
Ensembl Fungi: 62 -> 63
Ensembl Metazoa: 62 -> 63
Ensembl Plants: 62 -> 63
Ensembl Protists: 62 -> 63
Ensembl/GENCODE: human 49/mouse M38 -> human 50/mouse M39
Expression Atlas: 2026-06-23 -> 2026-09-18
piRBase: v2 -> v3
PSIQUIC: 2021-09-03 -> 2026-09-17
HGNC: 2026-04-28 -> 2026-09-10
CRW: 2020-09-21 -> 2026-09-10
Ribovision: 2022-02-09 -> 2026-09-10
FlyBase: FB2026_01 -> FB2026_03
PomBase: 2026-04-28 -> 2026-09-09
RGD: 2026-04-28 -> 2026-09-09
ZFIN: 2026-03-27 -> 2026-09-09
RefSeq: v235 -> v237
SILVA: 138.2 -> 144
GeneCards: 5.26 -> 6.1
MalaCards: 5.26 -> 6.1
PDBe: 2026-04-29 -> 2026-09-09
QuickGo: 2026-04-13 -> 2026-09-09
NONCODE: v5 -> v7
MGI: 6.10 -> 6.24
R2DT updates
We have re-run all sequences so that they are drawn with version 2.2 or higher. We have also worked to correct diagrams in which a sequence had been drawn using the template for a different type of RNA.
Genome mapping updates
We have improved genome mapping to cover very large genomes, mostly plants and corrected our thresholds to map more sequences overall.
Website updates
DocBot
The RNAcentral website now has DocBot, an AI assistant that answers questions about RNAcentral using our documentation. You can ask it how to search the database, download data or use the API, and it will answer with links to the relevant help pages. It appears on the bottom right of the website.
GOFlowLLM annotations
Some sequence pages show Gene Ontology annotations produced by GOFlowLLM. GOFlowLLM uses a large language model to follow a curation workflow over the scientific literature and suggest GO terms with supporting evidence. Where an RNA has been annotated by the system in multiple papers, these are now all shown on the RNA page, under the GoFlow Results tab. GoFlowLLM annotations are labelled so you can tell them apart from manually curated annotations.
Public database schema changes
This release changes the schema of the public Postgres database. If you query it directly, please update your queries:
Columns should now more accurately reflect their contents, e.g. the id column in rnc_rna_precomputed has been renamed urs_taxid
The upi column is now called urs in the rna and xref tables, to match the URS identifiers used everywhere else in RNAcentral. A query like SELECT upi FROM rna becomes SELECT urs FROM rna.
Some names that look old keep upi on purpose, such as a few index names. These don't affect queries. The FTP exports, API and website are not affected by these changes.
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, Bluesky, LinkedIn, or by submitting an issue on GitHub. We look forward to hearing from you!