Predicting enhancer-promoter interaction from genomic sequence with deep neural networks

Abstract

Background: In the human genome, distal enhancers are involved in regulating target genes through proximal promoters by forming enhancer-promoter interactions. Although recently developed high-throughput experimental approaches have allowed us to recognize potential enhancer-promoter interactions genome-wide, it is still largely unclear to what extent the sequence-level information encoded in our genome help guide such interactions.

Methods: Here we report a new computational method (named “SPEID”) using deep learning models to predict enhancer-promoter interactions based on sequence-based features only, when the locations of putative enhancers and promoters in a particular cell type are given.

Results: Our results across six different cell types demonstrate that SPEID is effective in predicting enhancer-promoter interactions as compared to state-of-the-art methods that only use information from a single cell type. As a proof-of-principle, we also applied SPEID to identify somatic non-coding mutations in melanoma samples that may have reduced enhancer-promoter interactions in tumor genomes.

Conclusions: This work demonstrates that deep learning models can help reveal that sequence-based features alone are sufficient to reliably predict enhancer-promoter interactions genome-wide.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

chromatin interaction / enhancer-promoter interaction / deep neural network

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SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS

The supplementary materials can be found online with this article at https://doi.org/10.1007/s40484-019-0154-0.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thank the members of the Ma lab, especially Yang Zhang, Yuchuan Wang, Ruochi Zhang, and Dechao Tian, for helpful discussions. We also thank Yihang Shen for technical assistance. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (1252522 to Shashank Singh, 1054309 and 1262575 to Jian Ma) and the National Institutes of Health (HG007352 and DK107965 to Jian Ma).

COMPLIANCE WITH ETHICS GUIDELINES

The authors Shashank Singh, Yang Yang, Barnabás Póczos and Jian Ma declare that they have no conflict of interests.

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

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