DFM-ac4C, a novel computational framework designed for the accurate prediction of ac4C modification sites, significantly outperforms existing models, achieving outstanding predictive metrics, and underscores DFM-ac4C's effectiveness as a robust and efficient tool for RNA ac4C site identification.
Identifying transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs) is fundamental to understanding complex gene regulatory mechanisms and the functions of non-coding regions. Although existing methods have achieved substantial strides, capturing both local structural features and long-range spatial dependencies within DNA sequences remains a major challenge for improving prediction accuracy. In this study, we propose DNCLA, a deep learning model that synergizes multisize convolutional fusion, Bidirectional Long ShortTerm Memory (Bi-LSTM) networks, and a multi-head self-attention
mechanism. At the feature extraction level, DNCLA breaks through the limitations of traditional single-sequence encoding by fusing Nucleotide Chemical Properties (NCP) with Dinucleotide Physicochemical Properties (DPCP). NCP provides a refined characterization of chemical differences between bases based on ring structures, hydrogen bond sites, and functional group properties, while DPCP introduces parameters such as local structural stability and geometric flexibility of the DNA. Subsequently, the model extracts spatial evolution from these high-dimensional features through a multi-size convolutional module; captures long-range spatial dependencies using Bi-LSTM layers; and employs a multi-head self-attention mechanism to achieve adaptive weight distribution of global features, thereby enhancing the perception of key regulatory motifs. Results from training and testing the proposed model on 165 ChIPseq datasets demonstrate that DNCLA possesses robust generalization capabilities and high predictive performance in TFBSs identification. This suggests that the incorporation of physicochemical features better elucidates the essence of interactions between transcription factors and DNA.
Jingjue Wei, Jie Feng· Match-communications in Math...· 0 citations
A concatenated deep neural network that incorporates both peptide and nucleotide embedding from masked language modeling (MLM), being able to discover complex associations between sequence information and lncRNA classification.
Case studies further validated predicted circRNA-drug associations, including cisplatin, enzalutamide, and sorafenib, against published experimental findings, demonstrating HMCDSP's capacity to reveal clinically relevant biomarkers and inform personalized therapeutic strategies.
Yongtian Wang, Wen-Kai Shen, Jiahao Li et al.· Interdisciplinary Sciences C...· 0 citations
MKMC (Multi-sample Kmer Counter), a scalable, reference-free toolkit for RNA-seq analysis that leverages k-mer–based statistics to detect biological variation without requiring alignment, is presented.
L. Mboning, Maciej Dlugosz, Marek Kokot et al.· bioRxiv· 0 citations
N6-methyladenosine (m6A), the most abundant mRNA modification in eukaryotes, plays essential roles in gene regulation and disease pathogenesis. Computational prediction of m6A sites offers a scalable alternative to costly experimental approaches, yet current methods rely predominantly on linear sequence features. This overlooks potentially informative RNA structural context, which is associated with local methylation patterns and may provide complementary predictive information beyond linear sequence motifs. To incorporate this complementary information, we propose SMART-m6A (Sequence–structure Multifeature Attention RNA Transformer for m6A), a deep learning framework that integrates sequence and structural information through parallel convolutional feature extraction and structure-guided attention for multifeature fusion. SMART-m6A achieves superior predictive performance compared to existing methods, with particularly clear advantages in sequence-ambiguous candidates. Beyond prediction accuracy, learned attention patterns reveal strong concordance with experimentally validated m6A-binding protein recognition sites and identify potentially novel regulatory motifs. Through systematic ablation studies and targeted structural-input perturbation analyses, we show that sequence and structure provide complementary predictive information, and that sites with greater prediction sensitivity to structural perturbation exhibit distinct local structural profiles between cell lines. Collectively, this work demonstrates the predictive value of sequence-derived structural features in m6A modeling and provides a multifeature deep learning framework for accurate and interpretable structure-aware epitranscriptomic prediction.
Ming-Ze Sun, Di Zhang, Zhiyuan Li et al.· PLoS Computational Biology· 0 citations
PLM-ArgMe is presented that is based on a symmetry-sensitive Transformer framework using context-aware ESM-2 residue embeddings, which is mapped through a novel Bio-Symmetric Mirrored Sinusoidal Encoding strategy to address the biological symmetry hypothesis of arginine methylation.
Nitika Bhatt, Kartik Joshi, R. Rout et al.· Biochemical and Biophysical...· 0 citations