YGMD: a repository for yeast cooperative transcription factor sets and their target gene modules

HBRWRLDA: predicting potential lncRNA-disease associations based on hypergraph bi-random walk with restart

Accumulating evidence indicates that the regulation of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) is closely related to a variety of diseases. Identifying meaningful lncRNA-disease associations will help to contribute to the understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying these diseases. However, only a limited number of associations between lncRNAs and diseases have been inferred from traditional biological experiments due to the high cost and highly specialized. Therefore, computational methods are increasingly used to reduce time of biological experiments and complement biological research. In this paper, a computational method called HBRWRLDA is proposed to predict lncRNA-disease associations. First, HBRWRLDA models the relationships between multiple nodes using hypergraphs, which allows HBRWRLDA to integrate the expression similarity of lncRNAs and the semantic similarity of diseases to construct hypergraphs. Then, a bi-random walk on hypergraphs is used to predict potential lncRNA-disease associations. HBRWRLDA achieves a higher area under the curve value of 0.9551 and [Formula: see text], respectively, compared with the other five advanced methods under the framework of one-leave cross validation (LOOCV) and five-fold cross-validation (5-fold CV). In addition, the prediction effect of HBRWRLDA was confirmed case studies of three diseases: renal cell carcinoma, gastric cancer, and hepatocellular carcinoma. Case studies demonstrates the capacity of HBRWRLDA to identify potentially disease-associated lncRNAs. Overall, HBRWRLDA is excellent at predicting potential lncRNA-disease associations and could be useful in conducting further biological experiments by helping researchers identify candidates of lncRNA-disease association.

Noncoding RNA therapeutics - challenges and potential solutions

Therapeutic targeting of noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs), such as microRNAs (miRNAs) and long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs), represents an attractive approach for the treatment of cancers, as well as many other diseases. Over the past decade, substantial effort has been made towards the clinical application of RNA-based therapeutics, employing mostly antisense oligonucleotides and small interfering RNAs, with several gaining FDA approval. However, trial results have so far been ambivalent, with some studies reporting potent effects whereas others demonstrated limited efficacy or toxicity. Alternative entities such as antimiRNAs are undergoing clinical testing, and lncRNA-based therapeutics are gaining interest. In this Perspective, we discuss key challenges facing ncRNA therapeutics - including issues associated with specificity, delivery and tolerability - and focus on promising emerging approaches that aim to boost their success.

Identifying TF Binding Motifs from a Partial Set of Target Genes and its Application to Regulatory Network Inference

Motif identification has been one of the most widely studied problems in bioinformatics. Many methods have been developed to discover binding motifs from a large set of genes. But when the given genes are only a partial set of target genes, the statistical significance usually contains a bias towards the input. If we can identify the TF binding motif from a partial set of target genes, we can save the labor costs and resources for doing many experiments. In this paper, we propose a method MISA (Motif Identification through Segments Assembly) to identify binding motifs from a subset of target genes. By ranking and assembling the segments, MISA discovers a set of binding motifs with the best length to fit our proposed objective function. We also predict the additional target genes as an application of regulatory network inference. We compare our approach with two widely used methods MEME and AlignACE by analyzing both the quality of the binding motif and network inference. Using two model organisms S. cerevisiae and E. coli, we show that with 20 percent of the target genes (minimum sample size of 20), we can achieve a motif similarity of 82 percent with the known motifs. Our results also show that 73 percent of target genes on average can be correctly predicted without introducing many false target genes.