Welcome to the DES-ROD, a next generation knowledge-mining resource, focused on the links between RNA oxidation and human diseases.

Normal cellular physiology and biochemical cellular processes require undamaged RNA molecules. However, RNAs are frequently subjected to oxidative damage. When oxidation damage affects RNAs carrying protein-coding information, this may result in the synthesis of aberrant proteins as well as lower the efficiency of translation. Both of these defects, as well as imbalanced redox homeostasis, fundamentally leads to numerous human diseases. Thus, the amount of literature focused on the effects of oxidatively damaged RNA in mammals is increasing yearly.

To explore links between different components related to oxidatively damaged RNA and human diseases, we processed published information in abstracts (PubMed) and full-text (PubMed Central) articles from 171,000 topic-relevant documents. Based on such information, we developed DES-ROD, an online knowledgebase which provide researchers with a platform from which they could more efficiently explore such information. The system utilizes concepts/terms from 42 curated thematic dictionaries that are mapped to the analyzed documents.

DES-Rod allows exploring:

  1. individual statistically enriched concepts,
  2. individual pairs of concepts,
  3. co-occurrence of all concepts with an individual concept,
  4. interactive heterogeneous networks of associated concepts, and
  5. hypotheses generated through semantic similarity
  6. export of user’s results.

DES-ROD presents to users statistically enriched single and associated concepts based on a default false discovery rate (FDR) below 0.05, where FRD is calculated based on Benjamini–Hochberg procedure for correction for multiplicity testing.

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