DeepTF: Accurate Prediction of Transcription Factor Binding Sites by Combining Multi-scale Convolution and Long Short-Term Memory Neural Network

Abstract

Transcription factor binding site (TFBS), one of the DNA-protein binding sites, plays important roles in understanding regulation of gene expression and drug design. Recently, deep-learning based methods have been widely used in the prediction of TFBS. In this work, we propose a novel deep-learning model, called Combination of Multi-Scale Convolutional Network and Long Short-Term Memory Network (MCNN-LSTM), which utilizes multi-scale convolution for feature processing, and the long short-term memory network to recognize TFBS in DNA sequences. Moreover, we design a new encoding method, called multi-nucleotide one-hot (MNOH), which considers the correlation between nucleotides in adjacent positions, to further improve the prediction performance of TFBS. Stringent cross-validation and independent tests on benchmark datasets demonstrated the efficacy of MNOH and MCNN-LSTM. Based on the proposed methods, we further implement a new TFBS predictor, called DeepTF. The computational experimental results show that our predictor outperformed several existing TFBS predictors.