Reading the Epitranscriptome: New Techniques and Perspectives.

Ribonucleotides can be covalently modified with over 100 known chemical moieties, greatly expanding the potential coding and regulatory repertoire of RNA. Recent advances in applying high-throughput sequencing to the study of RNA modifications have generated transcriptome-wide modification maps and demonstrated that modifications are abundant features of multiple classes of RNAs, including messenger RNAs. In turn, new regulatory functions for RNA modifications have been elucidated. Here, we review both targeted and global methods for surveying RNA modification, with a focus on how transcriptome-wide methods have helped expand the understanding of modification-mediated regulation of the transcriptome.