@article {13139, title = {Identification of protein-protected mRNA fragments and structured excised intron RNAs in human plasma by TGIRT-seq peak calling}, journal = {eLife}, year = {2020}, abstract = {Human plasma contains \>40,000 different coding and non-coding RNAs that are potential biomarkers for human diseases. Here, we used thermostable group II intron reverse transcriptase sequencing (TGIRT-seq) combined with peak calling to simultaneously profile all RNA biotypes in apheresis-prepared human plasma pooled from healthy individuals. Extending previous TGIRT-seq analysis, we found that human plasma contains largely fragmented mRNAs from \>19,000 protein-coding genes, abundant full-length, mature tRNAs and other structured small non-coding RNAs, and less abundant tRNA fragments and mature and pre-miRNAs. Many of the mRNA fragments identified by peak calling correspond to annotated protein-binding sites and/or have stable predicted secondary structures that could afford protection from plasma nucleases. Peak calling also identified novel repeat RNAs, miRNA-sized RNAs, and putatively structured intron RNAs of potential biological, evolutionary, and biomarker significance, including a family of full-length excised introns RNAs, subsets of which correspond to mirtron pre-miRNAs or agotrons.}, url = {https://elifesciences.org/articles/60743}, author = {Yao, Jun and Douglas C. Wu and Nottingham, Ryan M and Lambowitz, Alan M} }