Automatic Gene Ontology annotation of non-coding RNA sequences through association of Rfam records with GO terms

RNAcentral (1). (1) European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom; 2018

Rfam (http://rfam.org, PMID:29112718) is a database of non-coding RNA families which are manually annotated with GO terms by Rfam curators. RNAcentral (http://rnacentral.org, PMID:27794554) maintains a comprehensive collection of non-coding RNA sequences that are regularly annotated with Rfam families using the Infernal software (PMID:24008419). When a non-coding RNA sequence is matched to one or more Rfam families by sequence similarity, the GO terms associated with the Rfam family are transitively assigned to the non-coding RNA sequence. Annotations resulting from the transfer of GO terms are assigned the ECO:0000256 evidence code (match to sequence model evidence used in automatic assertion) and include RNAcentral and Rfam accessions. The annotations are available on the GOA and EMBL-EBI FTP sites. The mapping between Rfam families and GO terms is available at http://www.geneontology.org/external2go/rfam2go, and the Infernal software can be downloaded at http://eddylab.org/infernal. To report an annotation error or inconsistency, or for further information, please visit the RNAcentral website at http://rnacentral.org.