Predicting functions of maize proteins using graph convolutional network.

Journal: BMC bioinformatics
Published Date:

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Maize (Zea mays ssp. mays L.) is the most widely grown and yield crop in the world, as well as an important model organism for fundamental research of the function of genes. The functions of Maize proteins are annotated using the Gene Ontology (GO), which has more than 40000 terms and organizes GO terms in a direct acyclic graph (DAG). It is a huge challenge to accurately annotate relevant GO terms to a Maize protein from such a large number of candidate GO terms. Some deep learning models have been proposed to predict the protein function, but the effectiveness of these approaches is unsatisfactory. One major reason is that they inadequately utilize the GO hierarchy.

Authors

  • Guangjie Zhou
    School of Software, Shandong University, Jinan, China.
  • Jun Wang
    Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences and the Department of Neurology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA.
  • Xiangliang Zhang
    CEMSE, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, SA, Saudi Arabia. Electronic address: xiangliang.zhang@kaust.edu.sa.
  • Maozu Guo
    School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, Heilongjiang, China.
  • Guoxian Yu
    College of Computer and Information Science, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, China Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering of Ministry of Education, Jilin University, Changchun 130012, China.