Disease-Associated Circular RNAs: From Biology to Computational Identification

Figure 4

Key steps in studying circRNAs using publicly available pipelines. For read data, the library preparation is similar to traditional mRNA extraction. For stimulated data, several tools such as KNIFE and CIRI-simulator can be used. Alignment methods for linear RNAs, such as STAR and TopHat, are also commonly used for circRNAs, Therefore, a number of professional pipelines shown in Table 1 can be applied for circRNA detection, such as DCC and CIRI. For downstream analysis, other optional pipelines can be employed for different purposes. Finally, several pipelines can be used to check the association of circRNAs and diseases. The authors apologize for omitting any key pipelines or key steps. Illustration was generated using BioRender.