Adenosine-to-inosine RNA editing can markedly diversify the transcriptome, leading to a variety of critical molecular and biological processes in mammals. Over the past several years, researchers have developed several new pipelines and software packages to identify RNA editing sites with a focus on downstream statistical analysis and functional interpretation.
Researchers at the City University of Hong Kong developed a user-friendly public webserver named MIRIA that integrates statistics and visualization techniques to facilitate the comprehensive analysis of RNA editing sites data identified by the pipelines and software packages. MIRIA is unique in that provides several analytical functions, including RNA editing type statistics, genomic feature annotations, editing level statistics, genome-wide distribution of RNA editing sites, tissue-specific analysis and conservation analysis. The researchers collected high-throughput RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) data from eight tissues across seven species as the experimental data for MIRIA and constructed an example result page.
Example outputs of MIRIA
a Percentages of all 12 RNA editing types in Alu regions, repetitive non-Alu regions and non-repetitive regions. b Overview annotation table for a tissue. c Visualization interface showing all RNA editing sites within a gene. d Percentages of different genomic features across tissues in a species. e The overall RNA editing level across tissues in a species. f A Circos graph comparing the difference in the RNA editing numbers between different tissues at the genome-wide level. g Pearson correlations for the RNA editing levels of editing sites between various tissues in a species. h Heatmap showing the RNA editing levels of the top 200 conserved sites for human and other mammalian tissues. The hierarchical clustering dendrogram of tissues based on the correlations of the editing levels between tissues was appended at the top of the heatmap
Availability – MIRIA is freely available at https://mammal.deepomics.org