COPPER: an ensemble deep-learning approach for identifying exclusive virus-derived small interfering RNAs in plants.

Journal: Briefings in functional genomics
PMID:

Abstract

Antiviral defenses are one of the significant roles of RNA interference (RNAi) in plants. It has been reported that the host RNAi mechanism machinery can target viral RNAs for destruction because virus-derived small interfering RNAs (vsiRNAs) are found in infected host cells. Therefore, the recognition of plant vsiRNAs is the key to understanding the functional mechanisms of vsiRNAs and developing antiviral plants. In this work, we introduce a deep learning-based stacking ensemble approach, named computational prediction of plant exclusive virus-derived small interfering RNAs (COPPER), for plant vsiRNA prediction. COPPER used word2vec and fastText to generate sequence features and a hybrid deep learning framework, including a convolutional neural network, multiscale residual network and bidirectional long short-term memory network with a self-attention mechanism to enable precise predictions of plant vsiRNAs. Extensive benchmarking experiments with different sequence homology thresholds and ablation studies illustrated the comparative predictive performance of COPPER. In addition, the performance comparison with PVsiRNAPred conducted on an independent test dataset showed that COPPER significantly improved the predictive performance for plant vsiRNAs compared with other state-of-the-art methods. The datasets and source codes are publicly available at https://github.com/yuanyuanbu/COPPER.

Authors

  • Yuanyuan Bu
    School of Science, Dalian Maritimr University, Dalian 116026, China.
  • Cangzhi Jia
    Department of Mathematics, Dalian Maritime University, No. 1 Linghai Road, Dalian 116026, China. Electronic address: cangzhijia@dlmu.edu.cn.
  • Xudong Guo
    School of Medical Instruments and Food Engineering, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai 200093, China.
  • Fuyi Li
    College of Information Engineering, Northwest A&F University, Yangling 712100, China, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC 3800, Australia, National Engineering Laboratory for Industrial Enzymes and Key Laboratory of Systems Microbial Biotechnology, Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tianjin, China, Centre for Research in Intelligent Systems, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC 3800, Australia and ARC Centre of Excellence in Advanced Molecular Imaging, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC 3800, Australia.
  • Jiangning Song
    College of Information Engineering, Northwest A&F University, Yangling 712100, China, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC 3800, Australia, National Engineering Laboratory for Industrial Enzymes and Key Laboratory of Systems Microbial Biotechnology, Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tianjin, China, Centre for Research in Intelligent Systems, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC 3800, Australia and ARC Centre of Excellence in Advanced Molecular Imaging, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC 3800, Australia College of Information Engineering, Northwest A&F University, Yangling 712100, China, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC 3800, Australia, National Engineering Laboratory for Industrial Enzymes and Key Laboratory of Systems Microbial Biotechnology, Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tianjin, China, Centre for Research in Intelligent Systems, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC 3800, Australia and ARC Centre of Excellence in Advanced Molecular Imaging, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC 3800, Australia College of Information Engineering, Northwest A&F University, Yangling 712100, China, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC 3800, Australia, National Engineering Laboratory for Industrial Enzymes and Key Laboratory of Systems Microbial Biotechnology, Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tianjin, China, Centre for Research in Intelligent Systems, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC 3800, Australia and ARC Centre of Excellence in Advanced Molecular Imaging, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC 3800, Australia.