Title
Graph neural representational learning of RNA secondary structures for predicting RNA-protein interactions
Abstract
Motivation: RNA-protein interactions are key effectors of post-transcriptional regulation. Significant experimental and bioinformatics efforts have been expended on characterizing protein binding mechanisms on the molecular level, and on highlighting the sequence and structural traits of RNA that impact the binding specificity for different proteins. Yet our ability to predict these interactions in silico remains relatively poor. Results: In this study, we introduce RPI-Net, a graph neural network approach for RNA-protein interaction prediction. RPI-Net learns and exploits a graph representation of RNA molecules, yielding significant performance gains over existing state-of-the-art approaches. We also introduce an approach to rectify an important type of sequence bias caused by the RNase T1 enzyme used in many CLIP-Seq experiments, and we show that correcting this bias is essential in order to learn meaningful predictors and properly evaluate their accuracy. Finally, we provide new approaches to interpret the trained models and extract simple, biologically interpretable representations of the learned sequence and structural motifs.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1093/bioinformatics/btaa456
BIOINFORMATICS
DocType
Volume
Issue
Journal
36
SUPnan
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1367-4803
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zichao Yan111.02
William L. Hamilton292231.61
Mathieu Daniel Blanchette300.34