Bioinformatics for novel long intergenic noncoding RNA (lincRNA) identification in skeletal muscle cells

Abstract

Long intergenic noncoding RNAs (lincRNAs) have emerged as critical participators in gene regulation in myriads of cell types. The development of the whole transcriptome sequencing technology, or RNA-seq, has enabled novel lincRNA detection, but the bioinformatics analysis toward distinguishing reliable ones remains a challenge. Here, we describe the bioinformatics workflow developed for identifying novel lincRNAs step by step, including read alignment, transcriptome assembly and transcript filtering.