A Meta-Graph for the Construction of an RNA-Centered Knowledge Graph

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of RNA-based technologies for the development of new vaccines. Besides vaccines, a world of RNA-based drugs, including small non-coding RNA, could open new avenues for the development of novel therapies cover- ing the full spectrum of the main human diseases. In the context of the “National Center for Gene Therapy and Drugs based on RNA Technol- ogy” funded by the Italian PNRR and the NextGenerationEU program, our lab will contribute to the construction of a Knowledge Graph (KG) for RNA-drug analysis and the development of innovative algorithms to support RNA-drug discovery. In this paper, we describe the initial steps for the identification of public data sources from which information about different kinds of non-coding RNA sequences (and their relationships with other molecules) can be collected and used for feeding the KG. An in-depth analysis of the characteristics of these sources is provided, along with a meta-graph we developed to guide the RNA-KG construction by exploiting and integrating biomedical ontologies and relevant data from public databases.