FAIRsharing record for: PolyASite

This FAIRsharing record describes: Alternative cleavage and polyadenylation (APA) of RNAs gives rise to isoforms with different terminal exons, which in turn determine the fate of the RNA and the encoded protein. APA has thus been implicated in the regulation of cell proliferation, differentiation and disease development. PolyASite is a portal to the curated set of poly(A) sites inferred from publicly available 3’ end sequencing datasets. It allows efficient finding, exploration and export of poly(A) sites in several organisms. In constructing our poly(A) site atlas, we applied uniform quality measures, including the flagging of putative internal priming sites, to input datasets originating from different 3’ end sequencing techniques, cell types or tissues. Through integrated processing of all data, we identified and clustered sites that are closely spaced and share polyadenylation signals, as these are likely the result of stochastic variations in processing. For each cluster, we identified the representative - most frequently processed - site and estimated the relative use in the transcriptome across all samples. While other existing alternative polyadenylation databases rely on a single experimental method, or on poly(A) site estimation from RNA-seq data, PolyASite is built on data from several 3’ end sequencing techniques. This allows a broader coverage of cell types and poly(A) sites to support further genomics studies.