Construction and Current Status of the International Authoritative PIWI-Interacting RNA Database Platform

piRNA (PIWI-interacting RNA) is a kind of small noncoding RNA mainly expressed in germ cells and bound to PIWI proteins. It plays an important role in germ cells and gene regulation. Due to the huge amount and complexity of related data resources and the lack of systematic integration, a large number of data have not been fully mined and utilized, which limits the further study of piRNA. In order to interpret the massive data more effectively and assist in its functional studies, Center for Big Data Research in Health, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences has built a comprehensive database platform piRBase (piRNA database) that integrates a variety of piRNA data and targets information. Now the platform has collected more than 180 million non-redundant piRNA sequences, covering 440 datasets of 44 species. These data resources are integrated, analyzed and annotated from many aspects, which provides important support for the functional study of piRNA. This paper introduces the piRBase database platform from the aspects of platform composition, data collected, multidimensional information annotation, and platform application services, and briefly summarizes outcomes based on the platform and current status.