Dataset Information

Dragon PolyA Spotter: predictor of poly(A) motifs within human genomic DNA sequences.

ABSTRACT:

Motivation

Recognition of poly(A) signals in mRNA is relatively straightforward due to the presence of easily recognizable polyadenylic acid tail. However, the task of identifying poly(A) motifs in the primary genomic DNA sequence that correspond to poly(A) signals in mRNA is a far more challenging problem. Recognition of poly(A) signals is important for better gene annotation and understanding of the gene regulation mechanisms. In this work, we present one such poly(A) motif prediction method based on properties of human genomic DNA sequence surrounding a poly(A) motif. These properties include thermodynamic, physico-chemical and statistical characteristics. For predictions, we developed Artificial Neural Network and Random Forest models. These models are trained to recognize 12 most common poly(A) motifs in human DNA. Our predictors are available as a free web-based tool accessible at http://cbrc.kaust.edu.sa/dps. Compared with other reported predictors, our models achieve higher sensitivity and specificity and furthermore provide a consistent level of accuracy for 12 poly(A) motif variants.

Contact

vladimir.bajic@kaust.edu.sa

Supplementary information

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

SUBMITTER: Kalkatawi M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3244764 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Dragon PolyA Spotter: predictor of poly(A) motifs within human genomic DNA sequences.

Kalkatawi Manal M Rangkuti Farania F Schramm Michael M Jankovic Boris R BR Kamau Allan A Chowdhary Rajesh R Archer John A C JA Bajic Vladimir B VB

Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) 20111115 1

<h4>Motivation</h4>Recognition of poly(A) signals in mRNA is relatively straightforward due to the presence of easily recognizable polyadenylic acid tail. However, the task of identifying poly(A) motifs in the primary genomic DNA sequence that correspond to poly(A) signals in mRNA is a far more challenging problem. Recognition of poly(A) signals is important for better gene annotation and understanding of the gene regulation mechanisms. In this work, we present one such poly(A) motif prediction ...[more]

PMID: 22088842

Similar Datasets

Project description:Computational methods for discovery of sequence elements that are enriched in a target set compared with a background set are fundamental in molecular biology research. One example is the discovery of transcription factor binding motifs that are inferred from ChIP-chip (chromatin immuno-precipitation on a microarray) measurements. Several major challenges in sequence motif discovery still require consideration: (i) the need for a principled approach to partitioning the data into target and background sets; (ii) the lack of rigorous models and of an exact p-value for measuring motif enrichment; (iii) the need for an appropriate framework for accounting for motif multiplicity; (iv) the tendency, in many of the existing methods, to report presumably significant motifs even when applied to randomly generated data. In this paper we present a statistical framework for discovering enriched sequence elements in ranked lists that resolves these four issues. We demonstrate the implementation of this framework in a software application, termed DRIM (discovery of rank imbalanced motifs), which identifies sequence motifs in lists of ranked DNA sequences. We applied DRIM to ChIP-chip and CpG methylation data and obtained the following results. (i) Identification of 50 novel putative transcription factor (TF) binding sites in yeast ChIP-chip data. The biological function of some of them was further investigated to gain new insights on transcription regulation networks in yeast. For example, our discoveries enable the elucidation of the network of the TF ARO80. Another finding concerns a systematic TF binding enhancement to sequences containing CA repeats. (ii) Discovery of novel motifs in human cancer CpG methylation data. Remarkably, most of these motifs are similar to DNA sequence elements bound by the Polycomb complex that promotes histone methylation. Our findings thus support a model in which histone methylation and CpG methylation are mechanistically linked. Overall, we demonstrate that the statistical framework embodied in the DRIM software tool is highly effective for identifying regulatory sequence elements in a variety of applications ranging from expression and ChIP-chip to CpG methylation data. DRIM is publicly available at http://bioinfo.cs.technion.ac.il/drim.

Project description:MotivationPolyadenylation is the addition of a poly(A) tail to an RNA molecule. Identifying DNA sequence motifs that signal the addition of poly(A) tails is essential to improved genome annotation and better understanding of the regulatory mechanisms and stability of mRNA. Existing poly(A) motif predictors demonstrate that information extracted from the surrounding nucleotide sequences of candidate poly(A) motifs can differentiate true motifs from the false ones to a great extent. A variety of sophisticated features has been explored, including sequential, structural, statistical, thermodynamic and evolutionary properties. However, most of these methods involve extensive manual feature engineering, which can be time-consuming and can require in-depth domain knowledge.ResultsWe propose a novel machine-learning method for poly(A) motif prediction by marrying generative learning (hidden Markov models) and discriminative learning (support vector machines). Generative learning provides a rich palette on which the uncertainty and diversity of sequence information can be handled, while discriminative learning allows the performance of the classification task to be directly optimized. Here, we used hidden Markov models for fitting the DNA sequence dynamics, and developed an efficient spectral algorithm for extracting latent variable information from these models. These spectral latent features were then fed into support vector machines to fine-tune the classification performance. We evaluated our proposed method on a comprehensive human poly(A) dataset that consists of 14 740 samples from 12 of the most abundant variants of human poly(A) motifs. Compared with one of the previous state-of-the-art methods in the literature (the random forest model with expert-crafted features), our method reduces the average error rate, false-negative rate and false-positive rate by 26, 15 and 35%, respectively. Meanwhile, our method makes ~30% fewer error predictions relative to the other string kernels. Furthermore, our method can be used to visualize the importance of oligomers and positions in predicting poly(A) motifs, from which we can observe a number of characteristics in the surrounding regions of true and false motifs that have not been reported before.Availabilityhttp://sfb.kaust.edu.sa/Pages/Software.aspx.Supplementary informationSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Dataset Information

Dragon PolyA Spotter: predictor of poly(A) motifs within human genomic DNA sequences.

Motivation

Contact

Supplementary information

Publications

Dragon PolyA Spotter: predictor of poly(A) motifs within human genomic DNA sequences.

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