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Yao L, Xie P, Guan J, Chung CR, Huang Y, Pang Y, Wu H, Chiang YC, Lee TY. CapsEnhancer: An Effective Computational Framework for Identifying Enhancers Based on Chaos Game Representation and Capsule Network. J Chem Inf Model 2024. [PMID: 38946113 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jcim.4c00546] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 07/02/2024]
Abstract
Enhancers are a class of noncoding DNA, serving as crucial regulatory elements in governing gene expression by binding to transcription factors. The identification of enhancers holds paramount importance in the field of biology. However, traditional experimental methods for enhancer identification demand substantial human and material resources. Consequently, there is a growing interest in employing computational methods for enhancer prediction. In this study, we propose a two-stage framework based on deep learning, termed CapsEnhancer, for the identification of enhancers and their strengths. CapsEnhancer utilizes chaos game representation to encode DNA sequences into unique images and employs a capsule network to extract local and global features from sequence "images". Experimental results demonstrate that CapsEnhancer achieves state-of-the-art performance in both stages. In the first and second stages, the accuracy surpasses the previous best methods by 8 and 3.5%, reaching accuracies of 94.5 and 95%, respectively. Notably, this study represents the pioneering application of computer vision methods to enhancer identification tasks. Our work not only contributes novel insights to enhancer identification but also provides a fresh perspective for other biological sequence analysis tasks.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lantian Yao
- Kobilka Institute of Innovative Drug Discovery, School of Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen 518172, China
- School of Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen 518172, China
| | - Peilin Xie
- Kobilka Institute of Innovative Drug Discovery, School of Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen 518172, China
| | - Jiahui Guan
- School of Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen 518172, China
| | - Chia-Ru Chung
- Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Central University, Taoyuan 320317, Taiwan
| | - Yixian Huang
- School of Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen 518172, China
| | - Yuxuan Pang
- Division of Health Medical Intelligence, Human Genome Center, The Institute of Medical Science, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo 108-8639, Japan
| | - Huacong Wu
- School of Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen 518172, China
| | - Ying-Chih Chiang
- Kobilka Institute of Innovative Drug Discovery, School of Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen 518172, China
- School of Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen 518172, China
| | - Tzong-Yi Lee
- Institute of Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu 300093, Taiwan
- Center for Intelligent Drug Systems and Smart Bio-devices (IDS2B), National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu 300093, Taiwan
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Mehmood F, Arshad S, Shoaib M. ADH-Enhancer: an attention-based deep hybrid framework for enhancer identification and strength prediction. Brief Bioinform 2024; 25:bbae030. [PMID: 38385876 PMCID: PMC10885011 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbae030] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/20/2023] [Revised: 12/30/2023] [Accepted: 01/11/2024] [Indexed: 02/23/2024] Open
Abstract
Enhancers play an important role in the process of gene expression regulation. In DNA sequence abundance or absence of enhancers and irregularities in the strength of enhancers affects gene expression process that leads to the initiation and propagation of diverse types of genetic diseases such as hemophilia, bladder cancer, diabetes and congenital disorders. Enhancer identification and strength prediction through experimental approaches is expensive, time-consuming and error-prone. To accelerate and expedite the research related to enhancers identification and strength prediction, around 19 computational frameworks have been proposed. These frameworks used machine and deep learning methods that take raw DNA sequences and predict enhancer's presence and strength. However, these frameworks still lack in performance and are not useful in real time analysis. This paper presents a novel deep learning framework that uses language modeling strategies for transforming DNA sequences into statistical feature space. It applies transfer learning by training a language model in an unsupervised fashion by predicting a group of nucleotides also known as k-mers based on the context of existing k-mers in a sequence. At the classification stage, it presents a novel classifier that reaps the benefits of two different architectures: convolutional neural network and attention mechanism. The proposed framework is evaluated over the enhancer identification benchmark dataset where it outperforms the existing best-performing framework by 5%, and 9% in terms of accuracy and MCC. Similarly, when evaluated over the enhancer strength prediction benchmark dataset, it outperforms the existing best-performing framework by 4%, and 7% in terms of accuracy and MCC.
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Affiliation(s)
- Faiza Mehmood
- Department of Computer Science, University of Engineering and Technology Lahore, (Faisalabad Campus) Pakistan
| | - Shazia Arshad
- Department of Computer Science, University of Engineering and Technology Lahore, 54890, Pakistan
| | - Muhammad Shoaib
- Department of Computer Science, University of Engineering and Technology Lahore, 54890, Pakistan
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Luo X, Li Q, Tang Y, Liu Y, Zou Q, Zheng J, Zhang Y, Xu L. Predicting active enhancers with DNA methylation and histone modification. BMC Bioinformatics 2023; 24:414. [PMID: 37919681 PMCID: PMC10621108 DOI: 10.1186/s12859-023-05547-y] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/23/2023] [Accepted: 10/27/2023] [Indexed: 11/04/2023] Open
Abstract
BACKGROUND Enhancers play a crucial role in gene regulation, and some active enhancers produce noncoding RNAs known as enhancer RNAs (eRNAs) bi-directionally. The most commonly used method for detecting eRNAs is CAGE-seq, but the instability of eRNAs in vivo leads to data noise in sequencing results. Unfortunately, there is currently a lack of research focused on the noise inherent in CAGE-seq data, and few approaches have been developed for predicting eRNAs. Bridging this gap and developing widely applicable eRNA prediction models is of utmost importance. RESULTS In this study, we proposed a method to reduce false positives in the identification of eRNAs by adjusting the statistical distribution of expression levels. We also developed eRNA prediction models using joint gene expressions, DNA methylation, and histone modification. These models achieved impressive performance with an AUC value of approximately 0.95 for intra-cell prediction and 0.9 for cross-cell prediction. CONCLUSIONS Our method effectively attenuates the noise generated by stochastic RNA production, resulting in more accurate detection of eRNAs. Furthermore, our eRNA prediction model exhibited significant accuracy in both intra-cell and cross-cell validation, highlighting its robustness and potential application in various cellular contexts.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ximei Luo
- Institute of Fundamental and Frontier Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan, China
- School of Electronic and Communication Engineering, Shenzhen Polytechnic University, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China
| | - Qun Li
- Department of Pain, The Affiliated Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital of Southwest Medical University, Luzhou, Sichuan, China
| | - Yifan Tang
- Department of Anesthesiology, The Affiliated Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital of Southwest Medical University, Luzhou, Sichuan, China
| | - Yan Liu
- Department of Anesthesiology, The Affiliated Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital of Southwest Medical University, Luzhou, Sichuan, China
| | - Quan Zou
- Institute of Fundamental and Frontier Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan, China
- Yangtze Delta Region Institute (Quzhou), University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Quzhou, Zhejiang, China
| | - Jie Zheng
- Department of Anesthesiology, The Affiliated Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital of Southwest Medical University, Luzhou, Sichuan, China
| | - Ying Zhang
- Department of Anesthesiology, The Affiliated Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital of Southwest Medical University, Luzhou, Sichuan, China
| | - Lei Xu
- School of Electronic and Communication Engineering, Shenzhen Polytechnic University, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China.
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Wang W, Wu Q, Li C. iEnhancer-DCSA: identifying enhancers via dual-scale convolution and spatial attention. BMC Genomics 2023; 24:393. [PMID: 37442977 DOI: 10.1186/s12864-023-09468-1] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/30/2023] [Accepted: 06/20/2023] [Indexed: 07/15/2023] Open
Abstract
BACKGROUND Due to the dynamic nature of enhancers, identifying enhancers and their strength are major bioinformatics challenges. With the development of deep learning, several models have facilitated enhancers detection in recent years. However, existing studies either neglect different length motifs information or treat the features at all spatial locations equally. How to effectively use multi-scale motifs information while ignoring irrelevant information is a question worthy of serious consideration. In this paper, we propose an accurate and stable predictor iEnhancer-DCSA, mainly composed of dual-scale fusion and spatial attention, automatically extracting features of different length motifs and selectively focusing on the important features. RESULTS Our experimental results demonstrate that iEnhancer-DCSA is remarkably superior to existing state-of-the-art methods on the test dataset. Especially, the accuracy and MCC of enhancer identification are improved by 3.45% and 9.41%, respectively. Meanwhile, the accuracy and MCC of enhancer classification are improved by 7.65% and 18.1%, respectively. Furthermore, we conduct ablation studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of dual-scale fusion and spatial attention. CONCLUSIONS iEnhancer-DCSA will be a valuable computational tool in identifying and classifying enhancers, especially for those not included in the training dataset.
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Affiliation(s)
- Wenjun Wang
- School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China
- School of Data Science and Information Engineering, Guizhou Minzu University, Guiyang, China
- Key Laboratory of Big Data and Intelligent Robot, Ministry of Education, Guangzhou, China
| | - Qingyao Wu
- School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China.
- Pazhou Lab, Guangzhou, China.
- Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China.
| | - Chunshan Li
- Department of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Weihai, China.
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Phan LT, Oh C, He T, Manavalan B. A comprehensive revisit of the machine-learning tools developed for the identification of enhancers in the human genome. Proteomics 2023; 23:e2200409. [PMID: 37021401 DOI: 10.1002/pmic.202200409] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/10/2023] [Revised: 03/18/2023] [Accepted: 03/27/2023] [Indexed: 04/07/2023]
Abstract
Enhancers are non-coding DNA elements that play a crucial role in enhancing the transcription rate of a specific gene in the genome. Experiments for identifying enhancers can be restricted by their conditions and involve complicated, time-consuming, laborious, and costly steps. To overcome these challenges, computational platforms have been developed to complement experimental methods that enable high-throughput identification of enhancers. Over the last few years, the development of various enhancer computational tools has resulted in significant progress in predicting putative enhancers. Thus, researchers are now able to use a variety of strategies to enhance and advance enhancer study. In this review, an overview of machine learning (ML)-based prediction methods for enhancer identification and related databases has been provided. The existing enhancer-prediction methods have also been reviewed regarding their algorithms, feature selection processes, validation techniques, and software utility. In addition, the advantages and drawbacks of these ML approaches and guidelines for developing bioinformatic tools have been highlighted for a more efficient enhancer prediction. This review will serve as a useful resource for experimentalists in selecting the appropriate ML tool for their study, and for bioinformaticians in developing more accurate and advanced ML-based predictors.
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Affiliation(s)
- Le Thi Phan
- Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Laboratory, Department of Integrative Biotechnology, College of Biotechnology and Bioengineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea
| | - Changmin Oh
- Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Laboratory, Department of Integrative Biotechnology, College of Biotechnology and Bioengineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea
| | - Tao He
- Beidahuang Industry Group General Hospital, Harbin, China
| | - Balachandran Manavalan
- Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Laboratory, Department of Integrative Biotechnology, College of Biotechnology and Bioengineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea
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Wu H, Liu M, Zhang P, Zhang H. iEnhancer-SKNN: a stacking ensemble learning-based method for enhancer identification and classification using sequence information. Brief Funct Genomics 2023; 22:302-311. [PMID: 36715222 DOI: 10.1093/bfgp/elac057] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/10/2022] [Revised: 12/01/2022] [Accepted: 12/13/2022] [Indexed: 01/31/2023] Open
Abstract
Enhancers, a class of distal cis-regulatory elements located in the non-coding region of DNA, play a key role in gene regulation. It is difficult to identify enhancers from DNA sequence data because enhancers are freely distributed in the non-coding region, with no specific sequence features, and having a long distance with the targeted promoters. Therefore, this study presents a stacking ensemble learning method to accurately identify enhancers and classify enhancers into strong and weak enhancers. Firstly, we obtain the fusion feature matrix by fusing the four features of Kmer, PseDNC, PCPseDNC and Z-Curve9. Secondly, five K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) models with different parameters are trained as the base model, and the Logistic Regression algorithm is utilized as the meta-model. Thirdly, the stacking ensemble learning strategy is utilized to construct a two-layer model based on the base model and meta-model to train the preprocessed feature sets. The proposed method, named iEnhancer-SKNN, is a two-layer prediction model, in which the function of the first layer is to predict whether the given DNA sequences are enhancers or non-enhancers, and the function of the second layer is to distinguish whether the predicted enhancers are strong enhancers or weak enhancers. The performance of iEnhancer-SKNN is evaluated on the independent testing dataset and the results show that the proposed method has better performance in predicting enhancers and their strength. In enhancer identification, iEnhancer-SKNN achieves an accuracy of 81.75%, an improvement of 1.35% to 8.75% compared with other predictors, and in enhancer classification, iEnhancer-SKNN achieves an accuracy of 80.50%, an improvement of 5.5% to 25.5% compared with other predictors. Moreover, we identify key transcription factor binding site motifs in the enhancer regions and further explore the biological functions of the enhancers and these key motifs. Source code and data can be downloaded from https://github.com/HaoWuLab-Bioinformatics/iEnhancer-SKNN.
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Affiliation(s)
- Hao Wu
- College of Information Engineering, Northwest A&F University, Yangling, 712100, Shaanxi, China.,School of Software, Shandong University, Jinan, 250101, Shandong, China
| | - Mengdi Liu
- College of Information Engineering, Northwest A&F University, Yangling, 712100, Shaanxi, China
| | - Pengyu Zhang
- College of Information Engineering, Northwest A&F University, Yangling, 712100, Shaanxi, China
| | - Hongming Zhang
- College of Information Engineering, Northwest A&F University, Yangling, 712100, Shaanxi, China
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Aladhadh S, Almatroodi SA, Habib S, Alabdulatif A, Khattak SU, Islam M. An Efficient Lightweight Hybrid Model with Attention Mechanism for Enhancer Sequence Recognition. Biomolecules 2022; 13:biom13010070. [PMID: 36671456 PMCID: PMC9855522 DOI: 10.3390/biom13010070] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/04/2022] [Revised: 12/22/2022] [Accepted: 12/26/2022] [Indexed: 12/31/2022] Open
Abstract
Enhancers are sequences with short motifs that exhibit high positional variability and free scattering properties. Identification of these noncoding DNA fragments and their strength are extremely important because they play a key role in controlling gene regulation on a cellular basis. The identification of enhancers is more complex than that of other factors in the genome because they are freely scattered, and their location varies widely. In recent years, bioinformatics tools have enabled significant improvement in identifying this biological difficulty. Cell line-specific screening is not possible using these existing computational methods based solely on DNA sequences. DNA segment chromatin accessibility may provide useful information about its potential function in regulation, thereby identifying regulatory elements based on its chromatin accessibility. In chromatin, the entanglement structure allows positions far apart in the sequence to encounter each other, regardless of their proximity to the gene to be acted upon. Thus, identifying enhancers and assessing their strength is difficult and time-consuming. The goal of our work was to overcome these limitations by presenting a convolutional neural network (CNN) with attention-gated recurrent units (AttGRU) based on Deep Learning. It used a CNN and one-hot coding to build models, primarily to identify enhancers and secondarily to classify their strength. To test the performance of the proposed model, parallels were drawn between enhancer-CNNAttGRU and existing state-of-the-art methods to enable comparisons. The proposed model performed the best for predicting stage one and stage two enhancer sequences, as well as their strengths, in a cross-species analysis, achieving best accuracy values of 87.39% and 84.46%, respectively. Overall, the results showed that the proposed model provided comparable results to state-of-the-art models, highlighting its usefulness.
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Affiliation(s)
- Suliman Aladhadh
- Department of Information Technology, College of Computer, Qassim University, Buraydah 51452, Saudi Arabia
- Correspondence:
| | - Saleh A. Almatroodi
- Department of Medical Laboratories, College of Applied Medical Sciences, Qassim University, Buraydah 51452, Saudi Arabia
| | - Shabana Habib
- Department of Information Technology, College of Computer, Qassim University, Buraydah 51452, Saudi Arabia
| | - Abdulatif Alabdulatif
- Department of Computer Science, College of Computer, Qassim University, Buraydah 51452, Saudi Arabia
| | - Saeed Ullah Khattak
- Centre of Biotechnology and Microbiology, University of Peshawar, Peshawar 25120, Pakistan
| | - Muhammad Islam
- Department of Electrical Engineering, College of Engineering and Information Technology, Onaizah Colleges, Onaizah 56447, Saudi Arabia
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Butt AH, Alkhalifah T, Alturise F, Khan YD. A machine learning technique for identifying DNA enhancer regions utilizing CIS-regulatory element patterns. Sci Rep 2022; 12:15183. [PMID: 36071071 PMCID: PMC9452539 DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-19099-3] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/28/2022] [Accepted: 08/24/2022] [Indexed: 11/26/2022] Open
Abstract
Enhancers regulate gene expression, by playing a crucial role in the synthesis of RNAs and proteins. They do not directly encode proteins or RNA molecules. In order to control gene expression, it is important to predict enhancers and their potency. Given their distance from the target gene, lack of common motifs, and tissue/cell specificity, enhancer regions are thought to be difficult to predict in DNA sequences. Recently, a number of bioinformatics tools were created to distinguish enhancers from other regulatory components and to pinpoint their advantages. However, because the quality of its prediction method needs to be improved, its practical application value must also be improved. Based on nucleotide composition and statistical moment-based features, the current study suggests a novel method for identifying enhancers and non-enhancers and evaluating their strength. The proposed study outperformed state-of-the-art techniques using fivefold and tenfold cross-validation in terms of accuracy. The accuracy from the current study results in 86.5% and 72.3% in enhancer site and its strength prediction respectively. The results of the suggested methodology point to the potential for more efficient and successful outcomes when statistical moment-based features are used. The current study's source code is available to the research community at https://github.com/csbioinfopk/enpred.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ahmad Hassan Butt
- Department of Computer Science, School of Systems and Technology, University of Management and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan
| | - Tamim Alkhalifah
- Department of Computer, College of Science and Arts in Ar Rass, Qassim University, Ar Rass, Saudi Arabia.
| | - Fahad Alturise
- Department of Computer, College of Science and Arts in Ar Rass, Qassim University, Ar Rass, Saudi Arabia
| | - Yaser Daanial Khan
- Department of Computer Science, School of Systems and Technology, University of Management and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan
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Huang G, Luo W, Zhang G, Zheng P, Yao Y, Lyu J, Liu Y, Wei DQ. Enhancer-LSTMAtt: A Bi-LSTM and Attention-Based Deep Learning Method for Enhancer Recognition. Biomolecules 2022; 12:biom12070995. [PMID: 35883552 PMCID: PMC9313278 DOI: 10.3390/biom12070995] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/31/2022] [Revised: 07/03/2022] [Accepted: 07/07/2022] [Indexed: 01/27/2023] Open
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.
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Affiliation(s)
- Guohua Huang
- School of Electrical Engineering, Shaoyang University, Shaoyang 422000, China; (W.L.); (G.Z.); (P.Z.); (J.L.)
- Correspondence:
| | - Wei Luo
- School of Electrical Engineering, Shaoyang University, Shaoyang 422000, China; (W.L.); (G.Z.); (P.Z.); (J.L.)
| | - Guiyang Zhang
- School of Electrical Engineering, Shaoyang University, Shaoyang 422000, China; (W.L.); (G.Z.); (P.Z.); (J.L.)
| | - Peijie Zheng
- School of Electrical Engineering, Shaoyang University, Shaoyang 422000, China; (W.L.); (G.Z.); (P.Z.); (J.L.)
| | - Yuhua Yao
- School of Mathematics and Statistics, Hainan Normal University, Haikou 571158, China;
| | - Jianyi Lyu
- School of Electrical Engineering, Shaoyang University, Shaoyang 422000, China; (W.L.); (G.Z.); (P.Z.); (J.L.)
| | - Yuewu Liu
- College of Information and Intelligence, Hunan Agricultural University, Changsha 410083, China;
| | - Dong-Qing Wei
- State Key Laboratory of Microbial Metabolism, and School of Life Sciences and Biotechnology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China;
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Mulero Hernández J, Fernández-Breis JT. Analysis of the landscape of human enhancer sequences in biological databases. Comput Struct Biotechnol J 2022; 20:2728-2744. [PMID: 35685360 PMCID: PMC9168495 DOI: 10.1016/j.csbj.2022.05.045] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/28/2022] [Revised: 05/20/2022] [Accepted: 05/21/2022] [Indexed: 12/01/2022] Open
Abstract
The process of gene regulation extends as a network in which both genetic sequences and proteins are involved. The levels of regulation and the mechanisms involved are multiple. Transcription is the main control mechanism for most genes, being the downstream steps responsible for refining the transcription patterns. In turn, gene transcription is mainly controlled by regulatory events that occur at promoters and enhancers. Several studies are focused on analyzing the contribution of enhancers in the development of diseases and their possible use as therapeutic targets. The study of regulatory elements has advanced rapidly in recent years with the development and use of next generation sequencing techniques. All this information has generated a large volume of information that has been transferred to a growing number of public repositories that store this information. In this article, we analyze the content of those public repositories that contain information about human enhancers with the aim of detecting whether the knowledge generated by scientific research is contained in those databases in a way that could be computationally exploited. The analysis will be based on three main aspects identified in the literature: types of enhancers, type of evidence about the enhancers, and methods for detecting enhancer-promoter interactions. Our results show that no single database facilitates the optimal exploitation of enhancer data, most types of enhancers are not represented in the databases and there is need for a standardized model for enhancers. We have identified major gaps and challenges for the computational exploitation of enhancer data.
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Affiliation(s)
- Juan Mulero Hernández
- Dept. Informática y Sistemas, Universidad de Murcia, CEIR Campus Mare Nostrum, IMIB-Arrixaca, Spain
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