RNAct: Protein-RNA interaction predictions for model organisms with supporting experimental data

Protein-RNA interactions are implicated in a number of physiological roles as well as diseases, with molecular mechanisms ranging from defects in RNA splicing, localization and translation to the formation of aggregates. Currently, approximate to 1400 human proteins have experimental evidence of RNA-binding activity. However, only approximate to 250 of these proteins currently have experimental data on their target RNAs from various sequencing-based methods such as eCLIP. To bridge this gap, we used an established, computationally expensive protein-RNA interaction prediction method, catRAPID, to populate a large database, RNAct. RNAct allows easy lookup of known and predicted interactions and enables global views of the human, mouse and yeast protein-RNA interactomes, expanding them in a genome-wide manner far beyond experimental data (http://rnact.crg.eu).