iProm-Zea: A two-layer model to identify plant promoters and their types using convolutional neural network

Harnessing promoter elements to enhance gene editing in plants: perspectives and advances

Genome-edited plants, endowed with climate-smart traits, have been promoted as tools for strengthening resilience against climate change. Successful plant gene editing (GE) requires precise regulation of the GE machinery, a process controlled by the promoters, which drives its transcription through interactions with transcription factors (TFs) and RNA polymerase. While constitutive promoters are extensively used in GE constructs, their limitations highlight the need for alternative approaches. This review emphasizes the promise of tissue/organ specific as well as inducible promoters, which enable targeted GE in a spatiotemporal manner with no effects on other tissues. Advances in synthetic biology have paved the way for the creation of synthetic promoters, offering refined control over gene expression and augmenting the potential of plant GE. The integration of these novel promoters with synthetic systems presents significant opportunities for precise and conditional genome editing. Moreover, the advent of bioinformatic tools and artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the characterization of regulatory elements, enhancing our understanding of their roles in plants. Thus, this review provides novel insights into the strategic use of promoters and promoter editing to enhance the precision, efficiency and specificity of plant GE, setting the stage for innovative crop improvement strategies.

Combining diffusion and transformer models for enhanced promoter synthesis and strength prediction in deep learning

In the field of synthetic biology, the engineering of synthetic promoters that outperform their natural counterparts is of paramount importance, which can optimize the expression of exogenous genes, enhance the efficiency of metabolic pathways, and possess substantial commercial value. Research indicates that some synthetic promoters have higher transcriptional activity compared to strong natural promoters. However, with the exponential increase in complexity due to the 4n potential combinations in a promoter sequence of length n, identifying effective synthetic promoters remains a formidable challenge. Deep learning models, by adaptively learning from extensive data sets, have become instrumental in analyzing biological data. This study introduces a diffusion model-based approach for designing promoters viable in model bacteria such as Escherichia coli and cyanobacteria. This model proficiently assimilates and utilizes inherent biological features from natural promoter sequences to engineer synthetic variants. Additionally, we employed a transformer model to evaluate the efficacy of these synthetic promoters, aiming at screening those with high performance. The experimental findings suggest that the synthetic promoters by the diffusion model not only share key biological features with their natural counterparts but also demonstrate greater similarity to natural promoters than those generated by a variational autoencoder. In predicting promoter strength, the transformer model demonstrated improved performance over the convolutional neural network. Finally, we developed an integrated platform for generating promoters and predicting their strength.

IMPORTANCE

We demonstrated that diffusion models are superior in accomplishing the promoter synthesis task compared to other state-of-the-art deep learning models. The effectiveness of our method was validated using data sets of Escherichia coli and cyanobacteria promoters, showing more stable and prompt convergence and more natural-like promoters than the variational autoencoder model. We extracted sequence information, dimer information, and position information from promoters and combined them with a transformer model to predict promoter strength. Our prediction results were more accurate than those obtained with a convolutional neural network model. Our in silico experiments systematically introduced mutations in promoter sequences and explored their contribution to promoter strength, highlighting the depth of learning in our model.

DeepPhoPred: Accurate Deep Learning Model to Predict Microbial Phosphorylation

Phosphorylation is a substantial posttranslational modification of proteins that refers to adding a phosphate group to the amino acid side chain after translation process in the ribosome. It is vital to coordinate cellular functions, such as regulating metabolism, proliferation, apoptosis, subcellular trafficking, and other crucial physiological processes. Phosphorylation prediction in a microbial organism can assist in understanding pathogenesis and host-pathogen interaction, drug and antibody design, and antimicrobial agent development. Experimental methods for predicting phosphorylation sites are costly, slow, and tedious. Hence low-cost and high-speed computational approaches are highly desirable. This paper presents a new deep learning tool called DeepPhoPred for predicting microbial phospho-serine (pS), phospho-threonine (pT), and phospho-tyrosine (pY) sites. DeepPhoPred incorporates a two-headed convolutional neural network architecture with the squeeze and excitation blocks followed by fully connected layers that jointly learn significant features from the peptide's structural and evolutionary information to predict phosphorylation sites. Our empirical results demonstrate that DeepPhoPred significantly outperforms the existing microbial phosphorylation site predictors with its highly efficient deep-learning architecture. DeepPhoPred as a standalone predictor, all its source codes, and our employed datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/faisalahm3d/DeepPhoPred.

DNA promoter task-oriented dictionary mining and prediction model based on natural language technology

Promoters are essential DNA sequences that initiate transcription and regulate gene expression. Precisely identifying promoter sites is crucial for deciphering gene expression patterns and the roles of gene regulatory networks. Recent advancements in bioinformatics have leveraged deep learning and natural language processing (NLP) to enhance promoter prediction accuracy. Techniques such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs), long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, and BERT models have been particularly impactful. However, current approaches often rely on arbitrary DNA sequence segmentation during BERT pre-training, which may not yield optimal results. To overcome this limitation, this article introduces a novel DNA sequence segmentation method. This approach develops a more refined dictionary for DNA sequences, utilizes it for BERT pre-training, and employs an Inception neural network as the foundational model. This BERT-Inception architecture captures information across multiple granularities. Experimental results show that the model improves the performance of several downstream tasks and introduces deep learning interpretability, providing new perspectives for interpreting and understanding DNA sequence information. The detailed source code is available at https://github.com/katouMegumiH/Promoter_BERT .

Predmoter-cross-species prediction of plant promoter and enhancer regions

Motivation

Identifying cis-regulatory elements (CREs) is crucial for analyzing gene regulatory networks. Next generation sequencing methods were developed to identify CREs but represent a considerable expenditure for targeted analysis of few genomic loci. Thus, predicting the outputs of these methods would significantly cut costs and time investment.

Results

We present Predmoter, a deep neural network that predicts base-wise Assay for Transposase Accessible Chromatin using sequencing (ATAC-seq) and histone Chromatin immunoprecipitation DNA-sequencing (ChIP-seq) read coverage for plant genomes. Predmoter uses only the DNA sequence as input. We trained our final model on 21 species for 13 of which ATAC-seq data and for 17 of which ChIP-seq data was publicly available. We evaluated our models on Arabidopsis thaliana and Oryza sativa. Our best models showed accurate predictions in peak position and pattern for ATAC- and histone ChIP-seq. Annotating putatively accessible chromatin regions provides valuable input for the identification of CREs. In conjunction with other in silico data, this can significantly reduce the search space for experimentally verifiable DNA-protein interaction pairs.

Availability and implementation

The source code for Predmoter is available at: https://github.com/weberlab-hhu/Predmoter. Predmoter takes a fasta file as input and outputs h5, and optionally bigWig and bedGraph files.

Plant Promoters: Their Identification, Characterization, and Role in Gene Regulation

One of the strategies to overcome diseases or abiotic stress in crops is the use of improved varieties. Genetic improvement could be accomplished through different methods, including conventional breeding, induced mutation, genetic transformation, or gene editing. The gene function and regulated expression through promoters are necessary for transgenic crops to improve specific traits. The variety of promoter sequences has increased in the generation of genetically modified crops because they could lead to the expression of the gene responsible for the improved trait in a specific manner. Therefore, the characterization of the promoter activity is necessary for the generation of biotechnological crops. That is why several analyses have focused on identifying and isolating promoters using techniques such as reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), genetic libraries, cloning, and sequencing. Promoter analysis involves the plant genetic transformation method, a potent tool for determining the promoter activity and function of genes in plants, contributing to understanding gene regulation and plant development. Furthermore, the study of promoters that play a fundamental role in gene regulation is highly relevant. The study of regulation and development in transgenic organisms has made it possible to understand the benefits of directing gene expression in a temporal, spatial, and even controlled manner, confirming the great diversity of promoters discovered and developed. Therefore, promoters are a crucial tool in biotechnological processes to ensure the correct expression of a gene. This review highlights various types of promoters and their functionality in the generation of genetically modified crops.

iProm-Sigma54: A CNN Base Prediction Tool for σ54 Promoters

The sigma (σ) factor of RNA holoenzymes is essential for identifying and binding to promoter regions during gene transcription in prokaryotes. σ54 promoters carried out various ancillary methods and environmentally responsive procedures; therefore, it is crucial to accurately identify σ54 promoter sequences to comprehend the underlying process of gene regulation. Herein, we come up with a convolutional neural network (CNN) based prediction tool named “iProm-Sigma54” for the prediction of σ54 promoters. The CNN consists of two one-dimensional convolutional layers, which are followed by max pooling layers and dropout layers. A one-hot encoding scheme was used to extract the input matrix. To determine the prediction performance of iProm-Sigma54, we employed four assessment metrics and five-fold cross-validation; performance was measured using a benchmark and test dataset. According to the findings of this comparison, iProm-Sigma54 outperformed existing methodologies for identifying σ54 promoters. Additionally, a publicly accessible web server was constructed.

iProm-phage: A two-layer model to identify phage promoters and their types using a convolutional neural network

The increased interest in phages as antibacterial agents has resulted in a rise in the number of sequenced phage genomes, necessitating the development of user-friendly bioinformatics tools for genome annotation. A promoter is a DNA sequence that is used in the annotation of phage genomes. In this study we proposed a two layer model called "iProm-phage" for the prediction and classification of phage promoters. Model first layer identify query sequence as promoter or non-promoter and if the query sequence is predicted as promoter then model second layer classify it as phage or host promoter. Furthermore, rather than using non-coding regions of the genome as a negative set, we created a more challenging negative dataset using promoter sequences. The presented approach improves discrimination while decreasing the frequency of erroneous positive predictions. For feature selection, we investigated 10 distinct feature encoding approaches and utilized them with several machine-learning algorithms and a 1-D convolutional neural network model. We discovered that the one-hot encoding approach and the CNN model outperformed based on performance metrics. Based on the results of the 5-fold cross validation, the proposed predictor has a high potential. Furthermore, to make it easier for other experimental scientists to obtain the results they require, we set up a freely accessible and user-friendly web server at http://nsclbio.jbnu.ac.kr/tools/iProm-phage/.

ProB-Site: Protein Binding Site Prediction Using Local Features

Protein–protein interactions (PPIs) are responsible for various essential biological processes. This information can help develop a new drug against diseases. Various experimental methods have been employed for this purpose; however, their application is limited by their cost and time consumption. Alternatively, computational methods are considered viable means to achieve this crucial task. Various techniques have been explored in the literature using the sequential information of amino acids in a protein sequence, including machine learning and deep learning techniques. The current efficiency of interaction-site prediction still has growth potential. Hence, a deep neural network-based model, ProB-site, is proposed. ProB-site utilizes sequential information of a protein to predict its binding sites. The proposed model uses evolutionary information and predicted structural information extracted from sequential information of proteins, generating three unique feature sets for every amino acid in a protein sequence. Then, these feature sets are fed to their respective sub-CNN architecture to acquire complex features. Finally, the acquired features are concatenated and classified using fully connected layers. This methodology performed better than state-of-the-art techniques because of the selection of the best features and contemplation of local information of each amino acid.