A home for RNA families at RNA Biology

Abstract

We are pleased to announce the RNA families track for RNA Biology. This track will provide a forum of short publications detailing the structure, function and sequence conservation for RNA families. We envisage two main types of publication in this track, these will consist of analyses of relatively unstudied RNA families or significant review style updates to relatively well studied families. There will be two extra requirements for publication in this track; Firstly the deposition of an alignment and secondary structure in Stockholm format and secondly the generation or update of a corresponding entry in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. The first requirement will ensure a much needed archive of well curated sequence alignments and secondary structures for all researchers in the community. The second requirement is, as far as we are aware, a first for any scientific publication. The main reason we think this is a good idea is because a Wikipedia entry is usually among the top few hits from a Google search with a molecular biology keyword. Therefore, we would like to ensure that the RNA relevant information in Wikipedia is both reliable and current. We think that this track will provide an important mechanism by which time will be spent by experts to improve the record. In order to ensure this the Wikipedia update will be reviewed alongside the submitted article. Furthermore, the articles will be published both online and in print, they will be open-access and free (at least in the first years of the track). Only articles containing color figures and more than 4 journal pages will incur a fee. Researchers that have been in the field for a while will note that this track is similar in spirit to the old Protein Sequence Motifs articles published by Trends in Biochemical Sciences. 1 This was a very popular track, but it eventually ran out of high impact protein motifs to publish and was discontinued. The RNA field is unlikely to suffer any such problem in the forseeable future given the current rate of discovery of new and important families and classes of RNAs. Some examples of these are the snoRNAs, miRNAs, piRNAs, CRISPRs, guide RNAs and cis-regulatory RNAs such as riboswitches. These articles will undoubtably provide a valuable resource for projects such as Rfam. 2 Rfam is a small database of RNA alignments and secondary structures that is primarily used for the annotation of nucleotide sequences. These alignments and structures are sourced from literature; Due to a lack of standards for publishing RNA align