Genome-Wide Annotation of circRNAs and Their Alternative Back-Splicing/Splicing with CIRCexplorer Pipeline.

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) derived from back-spliced exons were sporadically identified about 25 years ago, and have been recently re-discovered genome-wide across different species. Interestingly, one gene locus can generate multiple circRNAs through alternative back-splicing and/or alternative splicing, thus expanding our understanding on the diversity and complexity of transcriptomes. Precise annotation of circRNAs with their alternative back-splicing and alternative splicing events is the basis for the functional characterization of different categories of circRNAs. Here we describe a step-by-step computational scheme to annotate circRNAs from publicly available RNA sequencing datasets with the CIRCexplorer2 pipeline.