Recent progress and challenges in high throughput RNA methylation sequencing data analysis

With the rapid development of high-throughput sequencing technologies, the emerging of methylated RNA immunoprecipitation sequencing (MeRIP-seq) technology makes it possible to detect RNA epigenetic modifications in a large scale, which allows transcriptome-wide profiling of RNA methylation. Mining the patterns of global mRNA methylation from these MeRIP-seq data can help reveal the potential functional roles of these mRNA methylations in regulating gene expression, splicing, RNA editing and RNA stability, effectively guiding the therapeutic intervention of cancer. Here, the principle of MeRIP-seq sequencing was first introduced. Then, the recent progress of the processing and analysis of MeRIP-seq data were comprehensively discussed. In the end, the computational problems and challenges faced in the process of MeRIP-seq data processing were also summarized.