scholarly journals RNA Secondary Structure Prediction by Using Discrete Mathematics: An Interdisciplinary Research Experience for Undergraduate Students

2010 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 348-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roni Ellington ◽  
James Wachira ◽  
Asamoah Nkwanta
Keyword(s):  
Secondary Structure ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Structure Prediction ◽  
Rna Secondary Structure ◽  
Secondary Structure Prediction ◽  
Discrete Mathematics ◽  
Biological Research ◽  
Research Experience ◽  
Rna Secondary Structure Prediction

The focus of this Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) project was on RNA secondary structure prediction by using a lattice walk approach. The lattice walk approach is a combinatorial and computational biology method used to enumerate possible secondary structures and predict RNA secondary structure from RNA sequences. The method uses discrete mathematical techniques and identifies specified base pairs as parameters. The goal of the REU was to introduce upper-level undergraduate students to the principles and challenges of interdisciplinary research in molecular biology and discrete mathematics. At the beginning of the project, students from the biology and mathematics departments of a mid-sized university received instruction on the role of secondary structure in the function of eukaryotic RNAs and RNA viruses, RNA related to combinatorics, and the National Center for Biotechnology Information resources. The student research projects focused on RNA secondary structure prediction on a regulatory region of the yellow fever virus RNA genome and on an untranslated region of an mRNA of a gene associated with the neurological disorder epilepsy. At the end of the project, the REU students gave poster and oral presentations, and they submitted written final project reports to the program director. The outcome of the REU was that the students gained transferable knowledge and skills in bioinformatics and an awareness of the applications of discrete mathematics to biological research problems.

scholarly journals RNA secondary structure prediction using deep learning with thermodynamic integration

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kengo Sato ◽  
Manato Akiyama ◽  
Yasubumi Sakakibara
Keyword(s):  
Deep Learning ◽  
Secondary Structure ◽  
Structure Prediction ◽  
Rna Secondary Structure ◽  
Secondary Structure Prediction ◽  
Secondary Structures ◽  
Thermodynamic Integration ◽  
Rna Secondary Structure Prediction ◽  
Rna Secondary Structures ◽  
Non Coding Rnas

RNA secondary structure prediction is one of the key technologies for revealing the essential roles of functional non-coding RNAs. Although machine learning-based rich-parametrized models have achieved extremely high performance in terms of prediction accuracy, the risk of overfitting for such models has been reported. In this work, we propose a new algorithm for predicting RNA secondary structures that uses deep learning with thermodynamic integration, thereby enabling robust predictions. Similar to our previous work, the folding scores, which are computed by a deep neural network, are integrated with traditional thermodynamic parameters to enable robust predictions. We also propose thermodynamic regularization for training our model without overfitting it to the training data. Our algorithm (MXfold2) achieved the most robust and accurate predictions in computational experiments designed for newly discovered non-coding RNAs, with significant 2–10 % improvements over our previous algorithm (MXfold) and standard algorithms for predicting RNA secondary structures in terms of F-value.

scholarly journals A max-margin training of RNA secondary structure prediction integrated with the thermodynamic model

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manato Akiyama ◽  
Kengo Sato ◽  
Yasubumi Sakakibara
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Secondary Structure ◽  
Structure Prediction ◽  
Rna Secondary Structure ◽  
Prediction Accuracy ◽  
Secondary Structure Prediction ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Support Vector ◽  
Rna Secondary Structure Prediction ◽  
Fine Grained

AbstractMotivation: A popular approach for predicting RNA secondary structure is the thermodynamic nearest neighbor model that finds a thermodynamically most stable secondary structure with the minimum free energy (MFE). For further improvement, an alternative approach that is based on machine learning techniques has been developed. The machine learning based approach can employ a fine-grained model that includes much richer feature representations with the ability to fit the training data. Although a machine learning based fine-grained model achieved extremely high performance in prediction accuracy, a possibility of the risk of overfitting for such model has been reported.Results: In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for RNA secondary structure prediction that integrates the thermodynamic approach and the machine learning based weighted approach. Ourfine-grained model combines the experimentally determined thermodynamic parameters with a large number of scoring parameters for detailed contexts of features that are trained by the structured support vector machine (SSVM) with the ℓ1 regularization to avoid overfitting. Our benchmark shows that our algorithm achieves the best prediction accuracy compared with existing methods, and heavy overfitting cannot be observed.Availability: The implementation of our algorithm is available at https://github.com/keio-bioinformatics/mxfold.Contact:[email protected]

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