Long non-coding RNA (LncRNA) and microRNA (miRNA) are both non-coding RNAs that play significant regulatory roles in many life processes. There is cumulating evidence showing that the interaction patterns between lncRNAs and miRNAs are highly related to cancer development, gene regulation, cellular metabolic process, etc. Contemporaneously, with the rapid development of RNA sequence technology, numerous novel lncRNAs and miRNAs have been found, which might help to explore novel regulated patterns. However, the increasing unknown interactions between lncRNAs and miRNAs may hinder finding the novel regulated pattern, and wet experiments to identify the potential interaction are costly and time-consuming. Furthermore, few computational tools are available for predicting lncRNA–miRNA interaction based on a sequential level. In this paper, we propose a hybrid sequence feature-based model, LncMirNet (lncRNA–miRNA interactions network), to predict lncRNA–miRNA interactions via deep convolutional neural networks (CNN). First, four categories of sequence-based features are introduced to encode lncRNA/miRNA sequences including k-mer (k = 1, 2, 3, 4), composition transition distribution (CTD), doc2vec, and graph embedding features. Then, to fit the CNN learning pattern, a histogram-dd method is incorporated to fuse multiple types of features into a matrix. Finally, LncMirNet attained excellent performance in comparison with six other state-of-the-art methods on a real dataset collected from lncRNASNP2 via five-fold cross validation. LncMirNet increased accuracy and area under curve (AUC) by more than 3%, respectively, over that of the other tools, and improved the Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) by more than 6%. These results show that LncMirNet can obtain high confidence in predicting potential interactions between lncRNAs and miRNAs.

With the rapid accumulation of gene expression data from various technologies, e.g., microarray, RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq), and single-cell RNA-seq, it is necessary to carry out dimensional reduction and feature (signature genes) selection in support of making sense out of such high dimensional data. These computational methods significantly facilitate further data analysis and interpretation, such as gene function enrichment analysis, cancer biomarker detection, and drug targeting identification in precision medicine. Although numerous methods have been developed for feature selection in bioinformatics, it is still a challenge to choose the appropriate methods for a specific problem and seek for the most reasonable ranking features. Meanwhile, the paired gene expression data under matched case-control design (MCCD) is becoming increasingly popular, which has often been used in multi-omics integration studies and may increase feature selection efficiency by offsetting similar distributions of confounding features. The appropriate feature selection methods specifically designed for the paired data, which is named as matched-pairs feature selection (MPFS), however, have not been maturely developed in parallel. In this review, we compare the performance of 10 feature-selection methods (eight MPFS methods and two traditional unpaired methods) on two real datasets by applied three classification methods, and analyze the algorithm complexity of these methods through the running of their programs. This review aims to induce and comprehensively present the MPFS in such a way that readers can easily understand its characteristics and get a clue in selecting the appropriate methods for their analyses.

Relationships among KRAS mutation status, expression of RAS pathway signaling molecules, and clinicopathological features and prognosis of patients with colorectal cancer

Measuring conditional relatedness between a pair of genes is a fundamental technique and still a significant challenge in computational biology. Such relatedness can be assessed by gene expression similarities while suffering high false discovery rates. Meanwhile, other types of features, e.g., prior-knowledge based similarities, is only viable for measuring global relatedness. In this paper, we propose a novel machine learning model, named Multi-Features Relatedness (MFR), for accurately measuring conditional relatedness between a pair of genes by incorporating expression similarities with prior-knowledge based similarities in an assessment criterion. MFR is used to predict gene-gene interactions extracted from the COXPRESdb, KEGG, HPRD, and TRRUST databases by the 10-fold cross validation and test verification, and to identify gene-gene interactions collected from the GeneFriends and DIP databases for further verification. The results show that MFR achieves the highest area under curve (AUC) values for identifying gene-gene interactions in the development, test, and DIP datasets. Specifically, it obtains an improvement of 1.1% on average of precision for detecting gene pairs with both high expression similarities and high prior-knowledge based similarities in all datasets, comparing to other linear models and coexpression analysis methods. Regarding cancer gene networks construction and gene function prediction, MFR also obtains the results with more biological significances and higher average prediction accuracy, than other compared models and methods. A website of the MFR model and relevant datasets can be accessed from http://bmbl.sdstate.edu/MFR.

Cancer is one of the most dangerous threats to human health. One of the issues is drug resistance action, which leads to side effects after drug treatment. Numerous therapies have endeavored to relieve the drug resistance action. Recently, anticancer peptides could be a novel and promising anticancer candidate, which can inhibit tumor cell proliferation, migration, and suppress the formation of tumor blood vessels, with fewer side effects. However, it is costly, laborious and time consuming to identify anticancer peptides by biological experiments with a high throughput. Therefore, accurately identifying anti-cancer peptides becomes a key and indispensable step for anticancer peptides therapy. Although some existing computer methods have been developed to predict anticancer peptides, the accuracy still needs to be improved. Thus, in this study, we propose a deep learning-based model, called ACPNet, to distinguish anticancer peptides from non-anticancer peptides (non-ACPs). ACPNet employs three different types of peptide sequence information, peptide physicochemical properties and auto-encoding features linking the training process. ACPNet is a hybrid deep learning network, which fuses fully connected networks and recurrent neural networks. The comparison with other existing methods on ACPs82 datasets shows that ACPNet not only achieves the improvement of 1.2% Accuracy, 2.0% F1-score, and 7.2% Recall, but also gets balanced performance on the Matthews correlation coefficient. Meanwhile, ACPNet is verified on an independent dataset, with 20 proven anticancer peptides, and only one anticancer peptide is predicted as non-ACPs. The comparison and independent validation experiment indicate that ACPNet can accurately distinguish anticancer peptides from non-ACPs.