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 covering the full spectrum of the main human diseases. In the context of the “National Center for Gene Therapy and Drugs based on RNA Technology” 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.