Studies have shown that long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are involved in a wide range of biological processes across many species. Albeit the number of functional lncRNAs has dramatically increased, a universe of lncRNAs in human is poorly identified, characterized and curated. Advances in high-throughput sequencing technologies lead to massive multi-omics data that are generated at an unprecedented rate and scale, providing possibilities in large-scale computational identification, molecular characterization and functional annotation of human lncRNAs. Here, I would like to take this opportunity to introduce the progresses made in the past several years by our team in the National Genomics Data Center (NGDC), China National Center for Bioinformation (CNCB) & Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, which mainly include: i) a novel algorithm named LGC (https://ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/lgc) that is able to accurately distinguish lncRNAs from protein-coding RNAs in a cross-species manner without any prior knowledge; ii) LncBook (https://ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/lncbook), a curated knowledgebase of human lncRNAs that features comprehensive integration and systematic curation based on multi-omics datasets; iii) LncExpDB (https://ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/lncexpdb), a specific database of human lncRNA's expression profiles; and iv) LncRNAWiki (https://ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/lncrnawiki), an open platform for community annotation of human lncRNAs. Collectively, CNCB-NGDC hosts a series of online services (LGC, LncBook, LncExpDB and LncRNAWiki) for identification, characterization and annotation of lncRNAs, representing a significant advance towards a universe of human lncRNAs.

long non-coding RNA; non-coding; identification; characterization; curation; multi-omics