Definer: A computational method for accurate identification of RNA pseudouridine sites based on deep learning.

Journal: PloS one
PMID:

Abstract

Pseudouridine is an important modification site, which is widely present in a variety of non-coding RNAs and is involved in a variety of important biological processes. Studies have shown that pseudouridine is important in many biological functions such as gene expression, RNA structural stability, and various diseases. Therefore, accurate identification of pseudouridine sites can effectively explain the functional mechanism of this modification site. Due to the rapid increase of genomics data, traditional biological experimental methods to identify RNA modification sites can no longer meet the practical needs, and it is necessary to accurately identify pseudouridine sites from high-throughput RNA sequence data by computational methods. In this study, we propose a deep learning-based computational method, Definer, to accurately identify RNA pseudouridine loci in three species, Homo sapiens, Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Mus musculus. The method incorporates two sequence coding schemes, including NCP and One-hot, and then feeds the extracted RNA sequence features into a deep learning model constructed from CNN, GRU and Attention. The benchmark dataset contains data from three species, H. sapiens, S. cerevisiae and M. musculus, and the results using 10-fold cross-validation show that Definer significantly outperforms other existing methods. Meanwhile, the data sets of two species, H. sapiens and S. cerevisiae, were tested independently to further demonstrate the predictive ability of the model. In summary, our method, Definer, can accurately identify pseudouridine modification sites in RNA.

Authors

  • Bo Han
    Faculty of Material Science and Chemistry, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan 430074, PR China.
  • Sudan Bai
    College of Information and Control Engineering, Jilin Institute of Chemical Technology, Jilin, P.R. China.
  • Yang Liu
    Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China.
  • Jiezhang Wu
    Department of Nuclear Medicine, General Hospital of Northern Theater Command, Shenyang, Liaoning, 110016, China; College of Medicine and Biological Information Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, Liaoning, 110167, China.
  • Xin Feng
    State Key Laboratory for Zoonotic Diseases, College of Veterinary Medicine, Jilin University, Changchun, China.
  • Ruihao Xin
    College of Information and Control Engineering, Jilin Institute of Chemical Technology, Jilin, P.R. China.