Articles - Bioinformatics

Reliable annotation of small non-coding RNA data produced by high-throughput sequencing is time-consuming and requires robust bioinformatics expertise.

Here we present the unitas tool, for easily annotating small RNA sequence datasets. Unitas has support for more than 800 species referenced in Ensembl databases. It provides also numerous analysis features in a user-friendly manner.

General requirement

1) Internet connection

2) Operating system: Unitas is provided as a standalone executable compatible for Linux, MAC and Windows.

3) Perl: Unitas is written in Perl, which is commonly preinstalled on MAC and Linux; so, normally you don't need to install Perl on Mac and linux


Windows users that prefer to run the Perl script rather than the executable file may have to install a free Perl distribution such as ActivePerl or Strawberry Perl.

Unitas workflow

1) Downloading of a collection of latest reference sequences for subsequent mapping. Unitas connects to the Mainz University Server (MUS) to load the latest list of URLs for downloading the required reference sequence data.

2) Automated 3'adapter recognition and trimming

3) Filtering low complexity reads

4) Small RNA annotation: miRNA, ncRNA, piRNA, phasiRNA

Download

The unitas source code and precompiled executable files are freely available at http://www.smallrnagroup.uni-mainz.de/software.html.