Pradhan, U. K. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2021

RBPSpot: Learning on Appropriate Contextual Information for RBP Binding Sites Discovery

Identifying RBP binding sites and mechanistic factors determining the interactions remain a big challenge. Besides the sparse binding motifs across the RNAs, it also requires a suitable sequence context for binding. The present work describes an approach to detect RBP binding sites while using an ultra-fast BWT/FM-indexing coupled inexact k-mer spectrum search for statistically significant seeds. The seed works as an anchor to evaluate the context and binding potential using flanking region information while leveraging from Deep Feed-forward Neural Network (DNN). Contextual features based on pentamers/dinucloetides which also capture shape and structure properties appeared critical. Contextual CG distribution pattern appeared important. The developed models also got support from MD-simulation studies and the implemented software, RBPSpot, scored consistently high for the considered performance metrics including average accuracy of [~]90% across a large number of validated datasets while maintaining consistency. It clearly outperformed some recently developed tools, including some with much complex deep-learning models, during a highly comprehensive bench-marking process involving three different data-sets and more than 50 RBPs. RBPSpot, has been made freely available, covering most of the human RBPs for which sufficient CLIP-seq data is available (131 RBPs). Besides identifying RBP binding spots across RNAs in human system, it can also be used to build new models by user provided data for any species and any RBP, making it a valuable resource in the area of regulatory system studies.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2020

Various RNA-binding proteins and their conditional networks explain miRNA biogenesis and help to reveal the potential SARS-CoV-2 host miRNAome system

Formation of mature miRNAs and their expression is a highly controlled process. It is very much dependent upon the post-transcriptional regulatory events. Recent findings suggest that several RNA binding proteins beyond Drosha/Dicer are involved in the processing of miRNAs. Deciphering of conditional networks for these RBP-miRNA interactions may help to reason the spatio-temporal nature of miRNAs which can also be used to predict miRNA profiles. In this direction, >25TB of data from different platforms were studied (CLIP-seq/RNA-seq/miRNA-seq) to develop Bayesian causal networks capable of reasoning miRNA biogenesis. The networks ably explained the miRNA formation when tested across a large number of conditions and experimentally validated data. The networks were modeled into an XGBoost machine learning system where expression information of the network components was found capable to quantitatively explain the miRNAs formation levels and their profiles. The models were developed for 1,204 human miRNAs whose accurate expression level could be detected directly from the RNA-seq data alone without any need of doing separate miRNA profiling experiments like miRNA-seq or arrays. A first of its kind, miRbiom performed consistently well with high average accuracy (91%) when tested across a large number of experimentally established data from several conditions. It has been implemented as an interactive open access web-server where besides finding the profiles of miRNAs, their downstream functional analysis can also be done. miRbiom will help to get an accurate prediction of human miRNAs profiles in the absence of profiling experiments and will be an asset for regulatory research areas. The study also shows the importance of having RBP interaction information in better understanding the miRNAs and their functional projectiles where it also lays the foundation of such studies and software in future.

bioinformatics↗