A deep learning based multiple RNA methylation sites prediction across species

Methylation of ribonucleic acid (RNA) is an essential post-transcriptional alteration that has a major effect on many biological processes. Identifying RNA methylation sites is essential for understanding gene regulation and potential therapeutic targets. The contribution of this study is multi-fold...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Sajid Shah, Saima Jabeen, Mohammed ElAffendi, Ishrat Khan, Muhammad Almas Anjum, Mohamed A. Bahloul
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier 2025-06-01
Series:Results in Engineering
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Online Access:http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590123025010163
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Summary:Methylation of ribonucleic acid (RNA) is an essential post-transcriptional alteration that has a major effect on many biological processes. Identifying RNA methylation sites is essential for understanding gene regulation and potential therapeutic targets. The contribution of this study is multi-folded. Firstly, this study introduces two novel deep learning models for predicting RNA methylation sites: Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based and transformer-based models. These models are trained and evaluated on human and mouse benchmark datasets for m1A, m6A, m5C, and A to I, methylation types. Secondly, this work investigates the effect of different encoding techniques on model performance, including one-hot encoding, Gene2Vec, and position encoding, as well as their combinations using concatenation, summation, and multiplication. Thirdly, this study also aims to investigate the prediction strength of motif-based and attention-based classifiers.The obtained results demonstrate that both models achieve high accuracy in predicting RNA methylation sites, outperforming existing state-of-the-art approaches in terms of multiple performance metrics. Moreover, the selection of encoding strategy has a substantial impact on prediction accuracy; the best approaches vary based on the particular species and type of methylation. The findings also indicate that the motif-based classifier is more stable than the attention-based classification when predicting RNA methylation. In the future, we aim to expand our research beyond human and mouse models to explore RNA methylation in plants.
ISSN:2590-1230