MOTIVATION: MirtronDB provides a comprehensive and up-to-date resource for advancing mirtron research within RNA biology. Therefore, maintaining a specialized and continuously updated resource for mirtrons is essential to support ongoing discoveries and to serve as a key reference for researchers investigating the roles of mirtrons. RESULTS: Here, we present mirtronDB 2.0, an enhanced version that expands both content and functionality. This version integrates mirtron data published between 2017 and 2025, increasing the number of documented mirtrons across various species. In addition, it incorporates newly predicted mirtrons identified through a robust pipeline that combines advanced bioinformatics and machine learning approaches, with specific coverage of six mammalian species. We have introduced new website features, including an interactive dashboard to enhance usability and facilitate intuitive data exploration. These rigorous updates consolidate mirtronDB as a key resource for mirtron to the RNA biology community. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: mirtronDB can be found under http://mirtrondb.cp.utfpr.edu.br/. The complete content of Database 2.0 and the source code for the analyses are also freely available in the FigShare repository: https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/MirtronDB_version2/29344775.

Due to the severity of the social media offensive and hateful comments in Brazil, and the lack of research in Portuguese, this paper provides the first large-scale expert annotated corpus of Brazilian Instagram comments for hate speech and offensive language detection. The HateBR corpus was collected from the comment section of Brazilian politicians’ accounts on Instagram and manually annotated by specialists, reaching a high inter-annotator agreement. The corpus consists of 7,000 documents annotated according to three different layers: a binary classification (offensive versus non-offensive comments), offensiveness-level classification (highly, moderately, and slightly offensive), and nine hate speech groups (xenophobia, racism, homophobia, sexism, religious intolerance, partyism, apology for the dictatorship, antisemitism, and fatphobia). We also implemented baseline experiments for offensive language and hate speech detection and compared them with a literature baseline. Results show that the baseline experiments on our corpus outperform the current state-of-the-art for the Portuguese language.

BACKGROUND: Microbes perform a fundamental economic, social, and environmental role in our society. Metagenomics makes it possible to investigate microbes in their natural environments (the complex communities) and their interactions. The way they act is usually estimated by looking at the functions they play in those environments and their responsibility is measured by their genes. The advances of next-generation sequencing technology have facilitated metagenomics research however it also creates a heavy computational burden. Large and complex biological datasets are available as never before. There are many gene predictors available that can aid the gene annotation process though they lack handling appropriately metagenomic data complexities. There is no standard metagenomic benchmark data for gene prediction. Thus, gene predictors may inflate their results by obfuscating low false discovery rates. RESULTS: We introduce geneRFinder, an ML-based gene predictor able to outperform state-of-the-art gene prediction tools across this benchmark by using only one pre-trained Random Forest model. Average prediction rates of geneRFinder differed in percentage terms by 54% and 64%, respectively, against Prodigal and FragGeneScan while handling high complexity metagenomes. The specificity rate of geneRFinder had the largest distance against FragGeneScan, 79 percentage points, and 66 more than Prodigal. According to McNemar's test, all percentual differences between predictors performances are statistically significant for all datasets with a 99% confidence interval. CONCLUSIONS: We provide geneRFinder, an approach for gene prediction in distinct metagenomic complexities, available at gitlab.com/r.lorenna/generfinder and https://osf.io/w2yd6/ , and also we provide a novel, comprehensive benchmark data for gene prediction-which is based on The Critical Assessment of Metagenome Interpretation (CAMI) challenge, and contains labeled data from gene regions-available at https://sourceforge.net/p/generfinder-benchmark .