CIRI-hub: an integrated and visual analytics platform for circular RNAs in cancers

Abstract Recent studies have demonstrated the emerging functions of circular RNAs (circRNAs) in regulating tumor progression and metastasis, and various databases have been established for exploring the expression patterns and features of circRNAs. However, all these databases only provide simple browsing or searching functions with a limited collection of samples, and none of them provides integrated analytical functions of given circRNAs or in-house RNA-Seq data. Here, we developed CIRI-hub, which provides a user-friendly webserver for integrative analyses of circRNAs and outputting publication-quality figures. CIRI-hub integrates a compendium of 2187 tumor and 680 normal RNA-seq libraries spanning 33 tissue types. The CIRI-hub webserver can accept various formats of input, and perform automated analysis of circRNAs in user input data as well as a variety of tumor and matching normal tissues. All analysis results can be downloaded as vectorized figures, and thresholds and plotting parameters can be interactively customized using the visual interface. We believe that CIRI-Hub will serve as a powerful tool for identifying novel cancer biomarkers and exploring the biological functions of circRNAs in tumorigenesis. Key Points CIRI-hub integrates a compendium of 2187 tumor and 680 normal RNA-seq libraries spanning 33 tissue types, and provides comprehensive analysis and visualization functions for pan-cancer circRNA analysis. CIRI-hub permits users to specific circRNAs of their interests or upload their dataset and provides interactively customization of analysis algorithms and plotting parameters on the web interface. CIRI-hub can serve as a powerful tool for identifying novel cancer biomarkers and exploring the biological functions of circRNAs in tumorigenesis.