{"doi":"10.1093/bfgp/elab019","title":"Biological functions of RNA modifications","abstract":"Long gone are the days when RNA was thought of as just an intermediate between DNA and proteins in the central dogma of molecular biology (DNA → RNA → Proteins). RNA has never ceased to surprise scientists throughout the past seven decades of molecular biology, from the postulation and discovery of transfer RNA in the 1950s to the emergence of RNA therapeutics jump-started by the COVID-19 global pandemic in 2020. One of most exiting surprises of the last decade was the realization that RNA modifications play key roles in regulating the fates of RNAs through the same rules of engagement as other epigenetic mechanisms, i.e. through writers, erasers and readers of RNA modifications, as initially proposed by Chuan He in his grand challenge commentary entitled ‘RNA epigenetics?’ in Nature Chemical Biology in 2010 [1]. The first papers showing RNA modification patterns of m6A on mammalian messenger RNA at the transcriptome-wide level [2, 3], allowed the re-discovery of seminal papers from the 1970s to 2000s, as well as the birth of the new field of epitranscriptomic research (reviewed in [4]). The discovery of the roles of phospho-methylation on microRNA processing [5], or of m5C on tRNA fragment generation [6] and vault RNA processing [7] further suggested that all classes of RNAs may be controlled by a variety of RNA modifications. After almost a decade from these initial papers, we have compiled a collection of easy-to-read reviews focusing on key RNA modifications and their molecular and biological functions.","journal":"Briefings in Functional Genomics","year":2021,"id":209363,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":3,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9439,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":303680,"name":"Blerta Xhemalçe","orcid":"0000-0002-0517-9607","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":18,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:52:05.171356Z","pmid":"33748834","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}