Dr. Yi Xing is the Francis West Lewis Endowed Chair and Director of the Center for Computational and Genomic Medicine at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Xing has an extensive publication record in bioinformatics, genomics, and RNA biology. His work has provided fundamental insights into the function, regulation, and evolution of post-transcriptional RNA processing in mammals.

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) have emerged as an important class of functional RNA molecules, but the conventional strategy of identifying circRNAs using short-read RNA sequencing is not well suited for determining the full-length sequences and exact exonic compositions of circRNAs. We report isoCirc, a novel experimental method and a companion computational tool for nanopore long-read sequencing of full-length circRNA isoforms. Using isoCirc, we generated a comprehensive catalog of 107,147 full-length circRNA isoforms across 12 human tissues and one human cell line (HEK293). Collectively, isoCirc provides a novel strategy and resource for studying circRNAs in human transcriptomes.

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