comrades-OO: An Object-Oriented R Package for Comprehensive Analysis of RNA Structure Generated using RNA crosslinking experiments

RNA molecules have secondary and tertiary structures in vivo which play a crucial role in various cellular processes such as the regulation of gene expression, RNA processing, and localization. Investigating these structures will enhance our understanding of their functions and contribute to the diagnosis and treatment of diseases caused by RNA dysregulation. However, there are no mature pipelines or packages for processing and analysing complex in vivo RNA structural data. Here, we present COMRADES Object-Oriented (comrades-OO), a novel software package for the comprehensive analysis of data derived from the COMRADES experiment. comrades-OO offers a comprehensive pipeline from raw sequencing reads to the identification of RNA structural features. It includes read processing and alignment, clustering of duplexes, data exploration, folding and comparisons of RNA structures. COMRADES-OO also enables comparisons between conditions, the identification of inter-RNA interactions, and the incorporation of reactivity data to improve structure prediction. We recently developed Crosslinking Of Matched RNAs And Deep Sequencing (COMRADES) for in-depth RNA conformation capture in living cells (Ziv et al., 2018). COMRADES can detect base-paired regions in RNA inside the cell, using a clickable psoralen derivative to specifically crosslink double-stranded RNA, and high throughput sequencing to retrieve the base-pairing information Following in vivo crosslinking, the viral RNA is selectively captured, fragmented and subjected to a click-chemistry reaction to add a biotin tag to crosslinked regions. Crosslinked RNA duplexes are then selectively captured using streptavidin affinity purification. Half of the resulting RNA is proximity ligated, following reversal of the crosslink to create chimeric RNA templates for high throughput sequencing. The other half is used as a control, in which reversal of the crosslink precedes the proximity ligation, and accurately represents the background level of non-specific ligation.COMRADES can therefore measure (i) the structural diversity of alternative RNA conformations that coexist inside cells; (ii) short-distance, as well as long-distance (over tens of thousands of nucleotides) base-pairing within the same RNA molecule; and (iii) base-pairing between different RNA molecules, such as those of host and viral origin (Kudla et al., 2020; Ziv et al., 2018).