A research team from the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has developed NaRaDa, a comprehensive database of nascent ribonucleic acid (RNA), according to a study recently published in The Innovation Life.

Understanding dynamic genomic transcriptional regulation is pivotal for unraveling cell fate and disease mechanisms. However, traditional RNA sequencing technologies have long been hampered by their reliance on high-abundance steady-state RNA, making it difficult to capture real-time transcriptional changes.

To address this gap, the team developed the nascent RNA sequencing technologies, offering an effective tool to monitor transcriptional dynamics. These advanced techniques provide insights into instantaneous nascent RNA expression, transcriptional pausing, and the activity of non-coding transcriptional regulatory elements.

To build the NaRaDa database, the researchers compiled 3,664 nascent RNA sequencing datasets spanning 22 species and 415 studies. The database includes detailed sample quality control metrics, enabling users to filter for high-quality datasets.

NaRaDa identifies 558,574 transcriptional regulatory elements, allowing researchers to explore genes of interest or filter projects by specific treatments or experimental conditions to retrieve relevant regulatory elements. It also supports online analysis of transcriptional regulation changes across datasets, including differential expression, transitions in RNA polymerase pause/release, and activity shifts in regulatory elements.

NaRaDa serves as a valuable resource for studying transcriptional initiation, RNA metabolic dynamics, and gene regulatory networks, the researchers noted.

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