m6AVar: a database of functional variants involved in m6A modification

Identifying disease-causing variants among a large number of single nucleotide variants (SNVs) is still a major challenge. Recently, N-6-methyladenosine (m(6)A) has become a research hotspot because of its critical roles in many fundamental biological processes and a variety of diseases. Therefore, it is important to evaluate the effect of variants on m(6)A modification, in order to gain a better understanding of them. Here, we report m6AVar (http://m6avar.renlab.org), a comprehensive database of m(6)A-associated variants that potentially influence m(6)A modification, which will help to interpret variants by m(6)A function. The m(6)A-associated variants were derived from three different m(6)A sources including miCLIP/PA-m(6)A-seq experiments (high confidence), MeRIP-Seq experiments (medium confidence) and transcriptome-wide predictions (low confidence). Currently, m6AVar contains 16 132 high, 71 321 medium and 326 915 low confidence level m(6)A-associated variants. We also integrated the RBP-binding regions, miRNA-targets and splicing sites associated with variants to help users investigate the effect of m(6)A-associated variants on post-transcriptional regulation. Because it integrates the data from genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and ClinVar, m6AVar is also a useful resource for investigating the relationship between the m(6)A-associated variants and disease. Overall, m6AVar will serve as a useful resource for annotating variants and identifying disease-causing variants.