RNA bioinformatics for precision medicine

Abstract

The high-throughput transcriptomic data generated by deep sequencing technologies urgently require bioinformatics methods for proper data visualization, analysis, storage, and interpretation. The involvement of noncoding RNAs in human diseases highlights their potential as biomarkers and therapeutic targets to facilitate the precision medicine. In this chapter, we give a brief overview of the bioinformatics tools to analyze different aspects of RNAs, in particular ncRNAs. We first describe the emerging bioinformatics methods for RNA identification, structure modeling, functional annotation, and network inference. This is followed by an introduction of potential usefulness of ncRNAs as diagnostic, prognostic biomarkers and therapeutic strategies.