The R-loop grammar predicts R-loop formation under different topological constraints

Abstract

R-loops are transient three-stranded nucleic acids that form during transcription when the nascent RNA hybridizes with the template DNA, freeing the non-template strand of the DNA. There is growing evidence that R-loops play important roles in physiological processes such as the regulation of gene expression, and that they contribute to chromosomal instability and disease. It is known that R-loop formation is influenced by both the sequence and the topology of the DNA substrate, but many questions remain about how R-loops form and the three-dimensional structures that they adopt. Here we represent an R-loop as a word in a formal grammar, the R-loop grammar. We use the R-loop grammar to predict R-loop formation. We train the R-loop grammar on experimental data obtained by single-molecule R-loop footprinting and sequencing (SMRF-seq). Despite not explicitly encoding topological information, the R-loop grammar accurately predicts R-loop formation on plasmids with varying starting topologies and outperforms previous methods in R-loop prediction.