Knowledge from Large-Scale Protein Contact Prediction Models Can Be Transferred to the Data-Scarce RNA Contact Prediction Task

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Jian, Yiren, Gao, Chongyang, Zeng, Chen, Zhao, Yunjie, Vosoughi, Soroush
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Jian, Yiren
Gao, Chongyang
Zeng, Chen
Zhao, Yunjie
Vosoughi, Soroush
author_facet Jian, Yiren
Gao, Chongyang
Zeng, Chen
Zhao, Yunjie
Vosoughi, Soroush
contents RNA, whose functionality is largely determined by its structure, plays an important role in many biological activities. The prediction of pairwise structural proximity between each nucleotide of an RNA sequence can characterize the structural information of the RNA. Historically, this problem has been tackled by machine learning models using expert-engineered features and trained on scarce labeled datasets. Here, we find that the knowledge learned by a protein-coevolution Transformer-based deep neural network can be transferred to the RNA contact prediction task. As protein datasets are orders of magnitude larger than those for RNA contact prediction, our findings and the subsequent framework greatly reduce the data scarcity bottleneck. Experiments confirm that RNA contact prediction through transfer learning using a publicly available protein model is greatly improved. Our findings indicate that the learned structural patterns of proteins can be transferred to RNAs, opening up potential new avenues for research.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2302_06120
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Knowledge from Large-Scale Protein Contact Prediction Models Can Be Transferred to the Data-Scarce RNA Contact Prediction Task
Jian, Yiren
Gao, Chongyang
Zeng, Chen
Zhao, Yunjie
Vosoughi, Soroush
Quantitative Methods
Machine Learning
RNA, whose functionality is largely determined by its structure, plays an important role in many biological activities. The prediction of pairwise structural proximity between each nucleotide of an RNA sequence can characterize the structural information of the RNA. Historically, this problem has been tackled by machine learning models using expert-engineered features and trained on scarce labeled datasets. Here, we find that the knowledge learned by a protein-coevolution Transformer-based deep neural network can be transferred to the RNA contact prediction task. As protein datasets are orders of magnitude larger than those for RNA contact prediction, our findings and the subsequent framework greatly reduce the data scarcity bottleneck. Experiments confirm that RNA contact prediction through transfer learning using a publicly available protein model is greatly improved. Our findings indicate that the learned structural patterns of proteins can be transferred to RNAs, opening up potential new avenues for research.
title Knowledge from Large-Scale Protein Contact Prediction Models Can Be Transferred to the Data-Scarce RNA Contact Prediction Task
topic Quantitative Methods
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.06120