Since January 2020, Elsevier has established a COVID-19 resource center, providing free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus. The center is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier has granted permission to make all its COVID-19-related research available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database, with unrestricted research reuse and analyses, provided that the original source is acknowledged. The study by Kim et al. provides a high-resolution map of the SARS-CoV-2 transcriptome and epitranscriptome, revealing a complex array of canonical and non-canonical viral transcripts with RNA modifications. The transcriptome is highly complex due to numerous discontinuous transcription events, and in addition to 10 canonical RNAs, SARS-CoV-2 produces RNAs encoding unknown ORFs. The study also discovers at least 41 potential RNA modification sites with an AAGAA motif, suggesting a link between modification and the 3′ tail length of modified RNAs. These findings open new directions for understanding the life cycle and pathogenicity of SARS-CoV-2.Since January 2020, Elsevier has established a COVID-19 resource center, providing free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus. The center is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier has granted permission to make all its COVID-19-related research available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database, with unrestricted research reuse and analyses, provided that the original source is acknowledged. The study by Kim et al. provides a high-resolution map of the SARS-CoV-2 transcriptome and epitranscriptome, revealing a complex array of canonical and non-canonical viral transcripts with RNA modifications. The transcriptome is highly complex due to numerous discontinuous transcription events, and in addition to 10 canonical RNAs, SARS-CoV-2 produces RNAs encoding unknown ORFs. The study also discovers at least 41 potential RNA modification sites with an AAGAA motif, suggesting a link between modification and the 3′ tail length of modified RNAs. These findings open new directions for understanding the life cycle and pathogenicity of SARS-CoV-2.