The yeast noncoding RNA interaction network

Abstract

This article describes the creation of the first expert manually curated noncoding RNA interaction networks for S. cerevisiae. The RNA–RNA and RNA–protein interaction networks have been carefully extracted from the experimental literature and made available through the IntAct database (www.ebi.ac.uk/intact). We provide an initial network analysis and compare their properties to the much larger protein–protein interaction network. We find that the proteins that bind to ncRNAs in the network contain only a small proportion of classical RNA binding domains. We also see an enrichment of WD40 domains suggesting their direct involvement in ncRNA interactions. We discuss the challenges in collecting noncoding RNA interaction data and the opportunities for worldwide collaboration to fill the unmet need for this data.