Enhancer-LSTMAtt: A Bi-LSTM and Attention-Based Deep Learning Method for Enhancer Recognition.

Journal: Biomolecules
Published Date:

Abstract

Enhancers are short DNA segments that play a key role in biological processes, such as accelerating transcription of target genes. Since the enhancer resides anywhere in a genome sequence, it is difficult to precisely identify enhancers. We presented a bi-directional long-short term memory (Bi-LSTM) and attention-based deep learning method (Enhancer-LSTMAtt) for enhancer recognition. Enhancer-LSTMAtt is an end-to-end deep learning model that consists mainly of deep residual neural network, Bi-LSTM, and feed-forward attention. We extensively compared the Enhancer-LSTMAtt with 19 state-of-the-art methods by 5-fold cross validation, 10-fold cross validation and independent test. Enhancer-LSTMAtt achieved competitive performances, especially in the independent test. We realized Enhancer-LSTMAtt into a user-friendly web application. Enhancer-LSTMAtt is applicable not only to recognizing enhancers, but also to distinguishing strong enhancer from weak enhancers. Enhancer-LSTMAtt is believed to become a promising tool for identifying enhancers.

Authors

  • Guohua Huang
    Provincial Key Laboratory of Informational Service for Rural Area of Southwestern Hunan, Shaoyang University, Shaoyang, China.
  • Wei Luo
    Centre for Pattern Recognition and Data Analytics, School of Information Technology, Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria, Australia.
  • Guiyang Zhang
    School of Information Engineering, Shaoyang University, Shaoyang 42200, China.
  • Peijie Zheng
    School of Electrical Engineering, Shaoyang University, Shaoyang, Hunan 422000, China.
  • Yuhua Yao
    College of Life Sciences, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, Hangzhou 310018, China; School of Mathematics and Statistics, Hainan Normal University, Haikou 571158, China. Electronic address: yaoyuhua2288@163.com.
  • Jianyi Lyu
    School of Electrical Engineering, Shaoyang University, Shaoyang 422000, China.
  • Yuewu Liu
    College of Information and Intelligence, Hunan Agricultural University, Changsha, Hunan 410081, China.
  • Dong-Qing Wei