AbstractEmerging evidence suggests that PIWI-interacting RNAs (piRNAs) are one of the most influential small non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) that regulate RNA silencing. piRNA and PIWI proteins have been confirmed for disease diagnosis and treatment as novel biomarkers due to its abnormal expression in various cancers. However, the current research is not strong enough to further clarify the functions of piRNA in cancer and its underlying mechanism. Therefore, how to provide large-scale and serious piRNA candidates for biological research has grown up to be a pressing issue. The main motivation of this work is tantamount to fill the gap in research on large-scale prediction of disease-related piRNAs. In this study, a novel computational model based on the structural perturbation method is proposed, called SPRDA. In detail, the duplex network is constructed based on the piRNA similarity network and disease similarity network extracted from piRNA sequence information, Gaussian interaction profile kernel similarity information and gene-disease association information. The structural perturbation method is then used to predict the potential associations on the duplex network, which is more predictive than other network structures in terms of structural consistency. In the five-fold cross-validation, SPRDA shows high performance on the benchmark dataset piRDisease, with an AUC of 0.9529. Furthermore, the predictive performance of SPRDA for 10 diseases shows the robustness of the proposed method. Overall, the proposed approach can provide unique insights into the pathogenesis of the disease and will advance the field of oncology diagnosis and treatment.
Prediction of potential disease-associated microRNAs using structural perturbation method
