ETENLNC: An end to end lncRNA identification and analysis framework to facilitate construction of known and novel lncRNA regulatory networks

Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) play crucial roles in the regulation of gene expression and maintenance of genomic integrity through various interactions with DNA, RNA, and proteins. The availability of large-scale sequence data from various high-throughput platforms has opened possibilities to identify, predict, and functionally annotate lncRNAs. As a result, there is a growing demand for an integrative computational framework capable of identifying known lncRNAs, predicting novel lncRNAs, and inferring the downstream regulatory interactions of lncRNAs at the genome-scale. We present ETENLNC (End-To-End-Novel-Long-NonCoding), a user-friendly, integrative, open-source, scalable, and modular computational framework for identifying and analyzing lncRNAs from raw RNA-Seq data. ETENLNC employs six stringent filtration steps to identify novel lncRNAs, performs differential expression analysis of mRNA and lncRNA transcripts, and predicts regulatory interactions between lncRNAs, mRNAs, miRNAs, and proteins. We benchmarked ETENLNC against six existing tools and optimized it for desktop workstations and high-performance computing environments using data from three different species. ETENLNC is freely available on GitHub: https://github.com/EvolOMICS-TU/ETENLNC.