Noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) have been focus of intense research over the last few years. Since characteristics and signals of ncRNAs are not entirely known, researchers use different computational tools together with their biological knowledge to predict putative ncRNAs. In this context, this work presents ncRNA-Agents, a multi-agent system to annotate ncRNAs based on the output of different tools, using inference rules to simulate biologists' reasoning. Experiments with data from the fungus Saccharomyces cerevisiae allowed to measure the performance of ncRNA-Agents, with better sensibility, when compared to Infernal, a widely used tool for annotating ncRNA. Besides, data of the Schizosaccharomyces pombe and Paracoccidioides brasiliensis fungi identified novel putative ncRNAs, which demonstrated the usefulness of our approach. NcRNA-Agents can be be found at: http://www.biomol.unb.br/ncrna-agents.
Keywords: Noncoding RNA annotation; fungi ncRNA annotation; knowledge-based reasoning; multi-agent system.