Motivation Promoters are short DNA consensus sequences that are localized proximal to the transcription start sites of genes, allowing transcription initiation of particular genes. However, the precise prediction of promoters remains a challenging task because individual promoters often differ from the consensus at one or more positions. Results In this study, we present a new multi-layer computational approach, called MULTiPly, for recognizing promoters and their specific types. MULTiPly took into account the sequences themselves, including both local information such as k-tuple nucleotide composition, dinucleotide-based auto covariance and global information of the entire samples based on bi-profile Bayes and k-nearest neighbour feature encodings. Specifically, the F-score feature selection method was applied to identify the best unique type of feature prediction results, in combination with other types of features that were subsequently added to further improve the prediction performance of MULTiPly. Benchmarking experiments on the benchmark dataset and comparisons with five state-of-the-art tools show that MULTiPly can achieve a better prediction performance on 5-fold cross-validation and jackknife tests. Moreover, the superiority of MULTiPly was also validated on a newly constructed independent test dataset. MULTiPly is expected to be used as a useful tool that will facilitate the discovery of both general and specific types of promoters in the post-genomic era. Availability and implementation The MULTiPly webserver and curated datasets are freely available at http://flagshipnt.erc.monash.edu/MULTiPly/. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

The web-server 4mCPred, is accessible at http://server.malab.cn/4mCPred/index.jsp.

Recent studies have increasingly shown that the chemical modification of mRNA plays an important role in the regulation of gene expression. N 7 -methylguanosine (m7G) is a type of positively-charged mRNA modification that plays an essential role for efficient gene expression and cell viability. However, the research on m7G has received little attention to date. Bioinformatics tools can be applied as auxiliary methods to identify m7G sites in transcriptomes. In this study, we develop a novel interpretable machine learning-based approach termed XG-m7G for the differentiation of m7G sites using the XGBoost algorithm and six different types of sequence-encoding schemes. Both 10-fold and jackknife cross-validation tests indicate that XG-m7G outperforms iRNA-m7G. Moreover, using the powerful SHAP algorithm, this new framework also provides desirable interpretations of the model performance and highlights the most important features for identifying m7G sites. XG-m7G is anticipated to serve as a useful tool and guide for researchers in their future studies of mRNA modification sites.

Enhancers are cis elements that play an important role in regulating gene expression by enhancing it. Recent study of modifications revealed that enhancers are a large group of functional elements with many different subgroups, which have different biological activities and regulatory effects on target genes. As powerful auxiliary tools, several computational methods have been proposed to distinguish enhancers from other regulatory elements, but only one method has been considered to clustering them into subgroups. In this study, we developed a predictor (called EnhancerPred) to distinguish between enhancers and nonenhancers and to determine enhancers’ strength. A two-step wrapper-based feature selection method was applied in high dimension feature vector from bi-profile Bayes and pseudo-nucleotide composition. Finally, the combination of 104 features from bi-profile Bayes, 1 feature from nucleotide composition and 9 features from pseudo-nucleotide composition yielded the best performance for identifying enhancers and nonenhancers, with overall Acc of 77.39%. The combination of 89 features from bi-profile Bayes and 10 features from pseudo-nucleotide composition yielded the best performance for identifying strong and weak enhancers, with overall Acc of 68.19%. The process and steps of feature optimization illustrated that it is necessary to construct a particular model for identifying strong enhancers and weak enhancers.