Finding the 'Goldilocks Zone' for identifying noncoding RNAs

What is it about?

Noncoding RNAs are critical to a range of biological processes, yet they can be hard to discover in DNA sequence data. Increasing use of RNA sequencing of organisms gives us an opportunity to identify more noncoding RNAs, by relying on their patterns of expression across organisms. However, telling the difference between real signal and noise is challenging. We analysed 400 publicly available RNA sequencing datasets spanning 37 Archaea and Bacteria, and compared expression patterns across organisms to identify possible noncoding RNAs. We found that in contrast to the identification of protein coding genes, which can be achieved by comparing distantly related organisms, close genetic relationships are needed to identify new noncoding RNA families. We only found one cluster of organisms within the publicly available datasets where isolates were closely related enough to identify new families while effectively excluding noise.

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Why is it important?

Our findings indicate that for researchers interested in learning more about noncoding RNA families, better sampling or organisms within an appropriate range of genetic distances is needed.