Mammalian ncRNA-disease repository: a global view of ncRNA-mediated disease network

Recently, substantial studies have begun to explore the functional diversity and mechanistic roles of ncRNAs in mammals. 1 Now, it has become increasingly apparent that ncRNAs are involved in multiple major biological processes, such as developmental timing, fat metabolism and cell death. 2 Furthermore, the epigenetic and genetic defects in ncRNAs and their processing machinery have been implicated in the etiology of many forms of diseases. 3 Several databases that documented the relevance of the microRNAs(miRNAs) to diseases have been constructed and provided useful results. 4 , 5 However, miRNAs are just the tip of the iceberg, other ncRNAs such as long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs), PIWI-interacting RNAs (piRNAs) and small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs) have also been demonstrated to contribute to diseases. 3 , 6 Accumulated evidence suggest the diverse non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) involved in a wide variety of diseases progression. 3 , 6 , 7 It is a key challenge for understanding the precise behavior of diverse ncRNAs in mammalian diseases and deciphering the cross-regulations among disease-associated ncRNAs. Because there was no repository focused on diverse ncRNA-disease relationships in mammals, we have developed a manually curated diverse ncRNA-disease repository (MNDR, www.rna-society.org/mndr/ ) by integrating evidence in three mammals. Totally, 807 lncRNA-associated, 229 miRNA-associated, 13 piRNA-associated and 100 snoRNA-associated entries for 1149 curated entries were documented for three mammals (866 Homo sapiens -associated, 251 Mus musculus -associated and 32 Rattus norvegicus -associated entries) ( Table 1 ).