A deep learning approach to identify gene targets of a therapeutic for human splicing disorders.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Gao D
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8185002 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Similar Datasets
Project description:Pre-mRNA splicing is a key control point in human gene expression. Disturbances in splicing due to mutation or aberrant splicing regulatory networks lead to dysregulated protein expression and contribute to a substantial fraction of human disease. Several classes of active and selective splicing modulator compounds (SMCs) have been recently identified and establish that pre-mRNA splicing represents a viable target for therapy. This also raises the intriguing possibility that SMCs may have broad capabilities to ameliorate aberrant splicing across multiple human disorders. We describe herein the identification of BPN-15477, a novel SMC that restores correct splicing of exon 20 in the Elongator complex protein 1 (ELP1) gene carrying the major IVS20+6T>C mutation responsible for familial dysautonomia. Given that BPN-15477 corrects splicing and increases full-length ELP1 protein in vivo, we developed a machine learning approach to evaluate the therapeutic potential of BPN-15477 to correct splicing in other human genetic diseases. Using transcriptome sequencing from compound-treated fibroblast cells, we identified treatment responsive sequence signatures, the majority of which center at the 5' splice site of exons whose inclusion or exclusion is modulated by SMC treatment. We then leveraged this model to identify 155 human disease genes that harbor ClinVar mutations predicted to alter pre-mRNA splicing as potential targets for BPN-15477 treatment. Using in vitro splicing assays, we validated representative predictions by demonstrating successful correction of splicing defects caused by mutations in the genes responsible for cystic fibrosis (CFTR), cholesterol ester storage disease (LIPA), Lynch syndrome (MLH1) and familial frontotemporal dementia (MAPT). Importantly, we also validated these predictions in two disease relevant cellular models for LIPA and CFTR, confirming that treatment increases functional protein and confirming the clinical potential for our model predictions. Our study shows that deep learning techniques can identify a complex set of sequence signatures and predict response to pharmacological modulation, strongly supporting the use of in silico approaches to expand the therapeutic potential of drugs that modulate splicing.
2021-03-29 | GSE158947 | GEO
Project description:A deep learning approach to identify new gene targets of a novel therapeutic for human splicing disorders
| PRJNA667079 | ENA
Project description:UnlabelledIn recent years, genome-sequencing projects of pathogens and humans have revolutionized microbial drug target identification. Of the several known genomic strategies, subtractive genomics has been successfully utilized for identifying microbial drug targets. The present work demonstrates a novel genomics approach in which codon adaptation index (CAI), a measure used to predict the translational efficiency of a gene based on synonymous codon usage, is coupled with subtractive genomics approach for mining potential drug targets. The strategy adopted is demonstrated using respiratory pathogens, namely, Streptococcus pneumoniae and Haemophilus influenzae as examples. Our approach identified 8 potent target genes (Streptococcus pneumoniae-2, H. influenzae-6), which are functionally significant and also play key role in host-pathogen interactions. This approach facilitates swift identification of potential drug targets, thereby enabling the search for new inhibitors. These results underscore the utility of CAI for enhanced in silico drug target identification.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11568-011-9152-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
| S-EPMC3238024 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Genetic interaction networks that underlie most human diseases are highly complex and poorly defined. Better-defined networks will allow identification of a greater number of therapeutic targets. Here we introduce our Yeast Augmented Network Analysis (YANA) approach and test it with the X-linked spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) disease gene UBA1. First, we express UBA1 and a mutant variant in fission yeast and use high-throughput methods to identify fission yeast genetic modifiers of UBA1. Second, we analyze available protein-protein interaction network databases in both fission yeast and human to construct UBA1 genetic networks. Third, from these networks we identified potential therapeutic targets for SMA. Finally, we validate one of these targets in a vertebrate (zebrafish) SMA model. This study demonstrates the power of combining synthetic and chemical genetics with a simple model system to identify human disease gene networks that can be exploited for treating human diseases.
| S-EPMC4097366 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundmicroRNAs (miRNAs) have been shown to play essential roles in a wide range of biological processes. Many computational methods have been developed to identify targets of miRNAs. However, the majority of these methods depend on pre-defined features that require considerable efforts and resources to compute and often prove suboptimal at predicting miRNA targets.ResultsWe developed a novel hybrid deep learning-based (DL-based) approach that is capable of predicting miRNA targets at a higher accuracy. This approach integrates convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that excel in learning spatial features and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) that discern sequential features. Therefore, our approach has the advantages of learning both the intrinsic spatial and sequential features of miRNA:target. The inputs for our approach are raw sequences of miRNAs and genes that can be obtained effortlessly. We applied our approach on two human datasets from recently miRNA target prediction studies and trained two models. We demonstrated that the two models consistently outperform the previous methods according to evaluation metrics on test datasets. Comparing our approach with currently available alternatives on independent datasets shows that our approach delivers substantial improvements in performance. We also show with multiple evidences that our approach is more robust than other methods on small datasets. Our study is the first study to perform comparisons across multiple existing DL-based approaches on miRNA target prediction. Furthermore, we examined the contribution of a Max pooling layer in between the CNN and RNN and demonstrated that it improves the performance of all our models. Finally, a unified model was developed that is robust on fitting different input datasets.ConclusionsWe present a new DL-based approach for predicting miRNA targets and demonstrate that our approach outperforms the current alternatives. We supplied an easy-to-use tool, miTAR, at https://github.com/tjgu/miTAR . Furthermore, our analysis results support that Max Pooling generally benefits the hybrid models and potentially prevents overfitting for hybrid models.
| S-EPMC7912887 | biostudies-literature
Project description:While outdoor advertisements are common features within towns and cities, they may reinforce social inequalities in health. Vulnerable populations in deprived areas may have greater exposure to fast food, gambling and alcohol advertisements, which may encourage their consumption. Understanding who is exposed and evaluating potential policy restrictions requires a substantial manual data collection effort. To address this problem we develop a deep learning workflow to automatically extract and classify unhealthy advertisements from street-level images. We introduce the Liverpool [Formula: see text] Street View (LIV360SV) dataset for evaluating our workflow. The dataset contains 25,349, 360 degree, street-level images collected via cycling with a GoPro Fusion camera, recorded Jan 14th-18th 2020. 10,106 advertisements were identified and classified as food (1335), alcohol (217), gambling (149) and other (8405). We find evidence of social inequalities with a larger proportion of food advertisements located within deprived areas and those frequented by students. Our project presents a novel implementation for the incidental classification of street view images for identifying unhealthy advertisements, providing a means through which to identify areas that can benefit from tougher advertisement restriction policies for tackling social inequalities.
| S-EPMC7921635 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundIn today's society, cancer has become a big concern. The most common cancers in women are breast cancer (BC), endometrial cancer (EC), ovarian cancer (OC), and cervical cancer (CC). CC is a type of cervix cancer that is the fourth most common cancer in women and the fourth major cause of death.ResultsThis research uses a network approach to discover genetic connections, functional enrichment, pathways analysis, microRNAs transcription factors (miRNA-TF) co-regulatory network, gene-disease associations, and therapeutic targets for CC. Three datasets from the NCBI's GEO collection were considered for this investigation. Then, using a comparison approach between the datasets, 315 common DEGs were discovered. The PPI network was built using a variety of combinatorial statistical approaches and bioinformatics tools, and the PPI network was then utilized to identify hub genes and critical modules.ConclusionFurthermore, we discovered that CC has specific similar links with the progression of different tumors using Gene Ontology terminology and pathway analysis. Transcription factors-gene linkages, gene-disease correlations, and the miRNA-TF co-regulatory network were revealed to have functional enrichments. We believe the candidate drugs identified in this study could be effective for advanced CC treatment.
| S-EPMC9892376 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is a continuous progression of pathophysiologic stages that is challenging to diagnose due to its inherent heterogeneity and poor standardization across a wide variety of diagnostic measures. NAFLD is heritable, and several loci have been robustly associated with various stages of disease. In the past few years, larger genetic association studies using new methodology have identified novel genes associated with NAFLD, some of which have shown therapeutic promise. This mini-review provides an overview of the heterogeneity in NAFLD phenotypes and diagnostic methods, discusses genetic associations in relation to the specific stages for which they were identified, and offers a perspective on the design of future genetic mapping studies to accelerate therapeutic target identification.
| S-EPMC8688763 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Engineered RNA elements are programmable tools capable of detecting small molecules, proteins, and nucleic acids. Predicting the behavior of these tools remains a challenge, a situation that could be addressed through enhanced pattern recognition from deep learning. Thus, we investigate Deep Neural Networks (DNN) to predict toehold switch function as a canonical riboswitch model in synthetic biology. To facilitate DNN training, we synthesized and characterized in vivo a dataset of 91,534 toehold switches spanning 23 viral genomes and 906 human transcription factors. DNNs trained on nucleotide sequences outperformed (R2=0.43-0.70) previous state-of-the-art thermodynamic and kinetic models (R2=0.04-0.15) and allowed for human-understandable attention-visualizations (VIS4Map) to identify success and failure modes. This deep learning approach constitutes a major step forward in engineering and understanding of RNA synthetic biology.
2020-08-12 | GSE149225 | GEO
Project description:ObjectiveSNOMED CT is the largest clinical terminology worldwide. Quality assurance of SNOMED CT is of utmost importance to ensure that it provides accurate domain knowledge to various SNOMED CT-based applications. In this work, we introduce a deep learning-based approach to uncover missing is-a relations in SNOMED CT.Materials and methodsOur focus is to identify missing is-a relations between concept-pairs exhibiting a containment pattern (ie, the set of words of one concept being a proper subset of that of the other concept). We use hierarchically related containment concept-pairs as positive instances and hierarchically unrelated containment concept-pairs as negative instances to train a model predicting whether an is-a relation exists between 2 concepts with containment pattern. The model is a binary classifier leveraging concept name features, hierarchical features, enriched lexical attribute features, and logical definition features. We introduce a cross-validation inspired approach to identify missing is-a relations among all hierarchically unrelated containment concept-pairs.ResultsWe trained and applied our model on the Clinical finding subhierarchy of SNOMED CT (September 2019 US edition). Our model (based on the validation sets) achieved a precision of 0.8164, recall of 0.8397, and F1 score of 0.8279. Applying the model to predict actual missing is-a relations, we obtained a total of 1661 potential candidates. Domain experts performed evaluation on randomly selected 230 samples and verified that 192 (83.48%) are valid.ConclusionsThe results showed that our deep learning approach is effective in uncovering missing is-a relations between containment concept-pairs in SNOMED CT.
| S-EPMC9933066 | biostudies-literature