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High-throughput annotation of full-length long noncoding RNAs with capture long-read sequencing

Nature Genetics volume 49, pages 1731–1740 (2017)Cite this article

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Abstract

Accurate annotation of genes and their transcripts is a foundation of genomics, but currently no annotation technique combines throughput and accuracy. As a result, reference gene collections remain incomplete—many gene models are fragmentary, and thousands more remain uncataloged, particularly for long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs). To accelerate lncRNA annotation, the GENCODE consortium has developed RNA Capture Long Seq (CLS), which combines targeted RNA capture with third-generation long-read sequencing. Here we present an experimental reannotation of the GENCODE intergenic lncRNA populations in matched human and mouse tissues that resulted in novel transcript models for 3,574 and 561 gene loci, respectively. CLS approximately doubled the annotated complexity of targeted loci, outperforming existing short-read techniques. Full-length transcript models produced by CLS enabled us to definitively characterize the genomic features of lncRNAs, including promoter and gene structure, and protein-coding potential. Thus, CLS removes a long-standing bottleneck in transcriptome annotation and generates manual-quality full-length transcript models at high-throughput scales.

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Figure 1: Using the CLS approach to extend GENCODE lncRNA annotation.
Figure 2: CLS yields an enriched, long-read transcriptome.
Figure 3: Extending known lncRNA gene structures.
Figure 4: Full-length transcript annotation.
Figure 5: Properties of full-length lncRNA transcripts.
Figure 6: Protein-coding potential of full-length lncRNAs.

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Acknowledgements

We thank members of the Guigó laboratory for their valuable input and help with sample handling, data analysis and writing of the manuscript, including E. Palumbo, F. Reverter, A. Breschi, D. Pervouchine, C. Arnan and F. Camara. We thank L. Armengol (qGenomics) for advice on RNA capture, D. Garrido (CRG) for help with eQTL analysis, S. Bonnin (CRG) for help with data manipulation in R, and I. Jungreis (MIT) for advice on PhyloCSF. J. Wright and J. Choudhary (Sanger Institute) helped with the search for peptide hits to putative coding regions. S. Djebali (INRA, France) kindly made available the Compmerge utility. This work and its publication were supported by the National Human Genome Research Institute of the US National Institutes of Health (grants U41HG007234, U41HG007000 and U54HG007004) and the Wellcome Trust (grant WT098051 to R.G.). R.J. was supported by the Ramón y Cajal Subprogram of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (grant RYC-2011-08851). Work in the laboratory of R.G. was supported by the National Human Genome Research Institute (awards U54HG0070, R01MH101814 and U41HG007234). This research was partly supported by NCCR RNA & Disease, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (to R.J.). We thank R. Garrido (CRG) for administrative support. We acknowledge support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa 2013–2017 (SEV-2012-0208), and from the CERCA Programme, Generalitat de Catalunya.

Author information

Author notes

  1. Barbara Uszczynska-Ratajczak

    Present address: Centre of New Technologies, Warsaw, Poland

  2. Jennifer Harrow

    Present address: Illumina, Cambridge, UK

  3. Rory Johnson

    Present address: Department of Clinical Research, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

  4. Julien Lagarde and Barbara Uszczynska-Ratajczak: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, Barcelona, Spain

    Julien Lagarde, Barbara Uszczynska-Ratajczak, Sílvia Pérez-Lluch, Amaya Abad, Roderic Guigo & Rory Johnson

  2. Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona, Spain

    Julien Lagarde, Barbara Uszczynska-Ratajczak, Sílvia Pérez-Lluch, Amaya Abad, Roderic Guigo & Rory Johnson

  3. R&D Department, Quantitative Genomic Medicine Laboratories (qGenomics), Barcelona, Spain

    Silvia Carbonell

  4. Functional Genomics Group, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, New York, USA

    Carrie Davis & Thomas R Gingeras

  5. Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, UK

    Adam Frankish & Jennifer Harrow

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Contributions

R.J., R.G., J.H., A.F., B.U.-R. and J.L. designed the experiment. S.C. generated cDNA libraries and performed the capture. C.D. and T.R.G. carried out PacBio sequencing of capture libraries. J.L. and B.U.-R. analyzed the data under the supervision of R.G. and R.J. R.J. wrote the manuscript, with contributions from J.L., B.U.-R. and R.G. S.P.-L. and A.A. performed the RT-PCR experiments.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Roderic Guigo or Rory Johnson.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Text and Figures

Supplementary Figures 1–17, Supplementary Tables 1–13 and Supplementary Note 1 (PDF 22645 kb)

Life Sciences Reporting Summary (PDF 129 kb)

Supplementary Data Set 1

Human protein-coding potential analysis on full-length reads. (ZIP 9063 kb)

This file lists the protein coding potential analysis for every full length read, using CPAT and PhyloCSF programs.

Supplementary Data Set 2

Novel human ORFs from PhyloCSF (XLSX 11 kb)

Supplementary Data Set 3

Oligonucleotide sequences used in this study (FASTA format) (TXT 1 kb)

This file provides the SMART cDNA library construction adapters, capture blockers and TruSeq adapter sequences used in the library construction (See Supplementary Figure 2c), as well as primer pairs used in the RT-PCR validation step.

Supplementary Data Set 4

RT-PCR sequences of CLS transcript models (FASTA format) (TXT 2 kb)

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Lagarde, J., Uszczynska-Ratajczak, B., Carbonell, S. et al. High-throughput annotation of full-length long noncoding RNAs with capture long-read sequencing. Nat Genet 49, 1731–1740 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3988

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