Circular RNA (or circRNA) is a type of single-stranded RNA which, unlike linear RNA, forms a covalently closed continuous loop.

The pipeline can automatically predict circRNAs from RNA-Seq sequencing data. In this pipeline, both human and mouse species are supported. The pipeline consists of three analysis steps. Firstly, Trimmomatic or NGS QC Toolkit software was used for quality control. Then, we supported two different combinations of tools including STAR_CIRCexplorer2, bwa_CIRI2 to identify circRNAs from the dataset.

The schematic diagram of RNA-Seq-circRNA pipeline is as follows:

Software and references:

• Trimmomatic: Trimmomatic: a flexible trimmer for Illumina sequence data.
• NGS QC Toolkit: NGS QC Toolkit: A Toolkit for Quality Control of Next Generation Sequencing Data.
• STAR: STAR: ultrafast universal RNA-seq aligner.
• BWA: Fast and accurate short read alignment with Burrows–Wheeler transform.
• CIRCexplorer2: Diverse alternative back-splicing and alternative splicing landscape of circular RNAs.
• CIRI: Circular RNA identification based on multiple seed matching.