On the identification of long non-coding RNAs from RNA-seq

Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are molecules more than 200 nucleotides involved in several biological processes. Next Generation Sequencing allows to identify transcripts containing both coding and non-coding RNAs, but no strategies have been identified so far to discover ncRNA (non-coding RNA) biological functions; thus, most of the ncRNA functionalities are still unknown. We propose a new approach to detect putative lncRNAs transcripts starting from an RNA-seq analysis performed by a reference-based assembly. The extracted transcripts are then analyzed to filter out protein transcripts, detecting putative, thus interesting, lncRNAs submitted to biologists for further validations.