Effective computational detection of piRNAs using n-gram models and support vector machine.
Journal:
BMC bioinformatics
Published Date:
Dec 28, 2017
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Piwi-interacting RNAs (piRNAs) are a new class of small non-coding RNAs that are known to be associated with RNA silencing. The piRNAs play an important role in protecting the genome from invasive transposons in the germline. Recent studies have shown that piRNAs are linked to the genome stability and a variety of human cancers. Due to their clinical importance, there is a pressing need for effective computational methods that can be used for computational identification of piRNAs. However, piRNAs lack conserved structural motifs and show relatively low sequence similarity across different species, which makes accurate computational prediction of piRNAs challenging.