AQUARIUM_HB: a bioinformatics pipeline for human blood circular RNA analysis

Abstract

Accurately identifying and quantifying human blood circular RNAs (circRNAs) from RNA-seq data is a critical bioinformatics challenge in biomarker discovery for human diseases. In this study, we present AQUARIUM-HB, a comprehensive bioinformatics pipeline for identifying, quantifying, annotating, and analyzing circRNAs from human blood transcriptomes. AQUARIUM-HB includes three functional modules. First, it identifies and annotates circRNAs from rRNA-depleted RNA-seq datasets of human blood samples. Second, it performs an in-depth expression analysis of blood circRNAs. Third, it constructs a reference set of full-length blood circRNAs. We demonstrate the application of AQUARIUM-HB using a human blood RNA-seq dataset from COVID-19 patients, showcasing its potential for improving the accuracy and depth of circRNA biomarker discovery.