m6A-TCPred: a web server to predict tissue-conserved human m6A sites using machine learning approach

BMC Bioinformatics. 2024 Mar 25;25(1):127. doi: 10.1186/s12859-024-05738-1.

Abstract

Background: N6-methyladenosine (m6A) is the most prevalent post-transcriptional modification in eukaryotic cells that plays a crucial role in regulating various biological processes, and dysregulation of m6A status is involved in multiple human diseases including cancer contexts. A number of prediction frameworks have been proposed for high-accuracy identification of putative m6A sites, however, none have targeted for direct prediction of tissue-conserved m6A modified residues from non-conserved ones at base-resolution level.

Results: We report here m6A-TCPred, a computational tool for predicting tissue-conserved m6A residues using m6A profiling data from 23 human tissues. By taking advantage of the traditional sequence-based characteristics and additional genome-derived information, m6A-TCPred successfully captured distinct patterns between potentially tissue-conserved m6A modifications and non-conserved ones, with an average AUROC of 0.871 and 0.879 tested on cross-validation and independent datasets, respectively.

Conclusion: Our results have been integrated into an online platform: a database holding 268,115 high confidence m6A sites with their conserved information across 23 human tissues; and a web server to predict the conserved status of user-provided m6A collections. The web interface of m6A-TCPred is freely accessible at: www.rnamd.org/m6ATCPred .

Keywords: Gene ontology; Machine learning; Support vector machine; Web server; m6A modification.

MeSH terms

  • Adenosine*
  • Computers*
  • Humans
  • Machine Learning
  • RNA Processing, Post-Transcriptional

Substances

  • Adenosine
  • N-methyladenosine