DLC-ac4C: A Prediction Model for N4-acetylcytidine Sites in Human mRNA Based on DenseNet and Bidirectional LSTM Methods

Introduction: N4 acetylcytidine (ac4C) is a highly conserved nucleoside modification that is essential for the regulation of immune functions in organisms. Currently, the identification of ac4C is primarily achieved using biological methods, which can be time-consuming and laborintensive. In contrast, accurate identification of ac4C by computational methods has become a more effective method for classification and prediction Aim: To the best of our knowledge, although there are several computational methods for ac4C locus prediction, the performance of the models they constructed is poor, and the network structure they used is relatively simple and suffers from the disadvantage of network degradation. This study aims to improve these limitations by proposing a predictive model based on integrated deep learning to better help identify ac4C sites. Methods: In this study, we propose a new integrated deep learning prediction framework, DLCac4C. First, we encode RNA sequences based on three feature encoding schemes, namely C2 encoding, nucleotide chemical property (NCP) encoding, and nucleotide density (ND) encoding. Second, one-dimensional convolutional layers and densely connected convolutional networks (DenseNet) are used to learn local features, and bi-directional long short-term memory networks (Bi-LSTM) are used to learn global features. Third, a channel attention mechanism is introduced to determine the importance of sequence characteristics. Finally, a homomorphic integration strategy is used to limit the generalization error of the model, which further improves the performance of the model. Results: The DLC-ac4C model performed well in terms of sensitivity (Sn), specificity (Sp), accuracy (Acc), Mathews correlation coefficient (MCC), and area under the curve (AUC) for the independent test data with 86.23%, 79.71%, 82.97%, 66.08%, and 90.42%, respectively, which was significantly better than the prediction accuracy of the existing methods. Conclusion: Our model not only combines DenseNet and Bi-LSTM, but also uses the channel attention mechanism to better capture hidden information features from a sequence perspective, and can identify ac4C sites more effectively.