Plant RNA editing is an important post-transcriptional process that maintains the normal biological functions of plant organelles. With the accumulation of research on plant RNA editing, a variety of editing factors have been identified as essential components of plant RNA editosomes.

A complete picture of plant RNA editosomes is of fundamental significance to better understand both the diversity of plant RNA editing machinery and the potential applications. Recently, the BIG Data Center at Beijing Institute of Genomics of Chinese Academy of Sciences developed the first curated plant RNA editosome database-Plant Editosome Database (PED).

As a featured resource of BIG Data Center, PED is committed to the curation, integration and standardization of plant editosome related data. The study was published online in Nucleic Acids Research.

PED features comprehensive integration of RNA editing factors and their associated data manually curated from related literature and public organelle annotation files. In the current version, PED houses a total of 98 RNA editing factors and 20,836 editing events, involving 203 kinds of organelle genes from 1,673 organelles of 1,621 plant species.

Also, PED includes interaction maps of experimentally validated editing factors and editing events in eight model species, phenotypes affected by editing factors as well as detailed experimental evidence.

Collectively, this database has great potential to help researchers conduct systematic investigations on RNA editing machinery in a variety of plant species.

This study was supported by Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences, National Key Research & Development Program of China, National Key Research Program of China, etc.

Statistics of experimentally validated RNA editing factors and associated edited genes in PED (Image by BIG Data Center)