Mock, F. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2019

A comprehensive annotation and differential expression analysis of short and long non-coding RNAs in 16 bat genomes

Although bats are increasingly becoming the focus of scientific studies due to their unique properties, these exceptional animals are still among the least studied mammals. Assembly quality and completeness of bat genomes vary a lot and especially non-coding RNA (ncRNA) annotations are incomplete or simply missing. Accordingly, standard bioinformatics pipelines for gene expression analysis often ignore ncRNAs such as microRNAs or long antisense RNAs. The main cause of this problem is the use of incomplete genome annotations. We present a complete screening for ncRNAs within 16 bat genomes. NcRNAs affect a remarkable variety of vital biological functions, including gene expression regulation, RNA processing, RNA interference and, as recently described, regulatory processes in viral infections. Within all investigated bat assemblies we annotated 667 ncRNA families including 162 snoRNAs and 193 miRNAs as well as rRNAs, tRNAs, several snRNAs and IncRNAs, and other structural ncRNA elements. We validated our ncRNA candidates by six RNA-Seq data sets and show significant expression patterns that have never been described before in a bat species on such a large scale. Our annotations will be usable as a resource (Electronic Supplement) for deeper studying of bat evolution, ncRNAs repertoire, gene expression and regulation, ecology, and important host-virus interactions. Supplementary informationis available at rna.uni-jena.de/supplements/bats, the Open Science Framework (doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/4CMDN), and GitHub (github.com/rnajena/bats_ncrna).

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2019

Viral host prediction with Deep Learning

MotivationZoonosis, the natural transmission of infections from animals to humans, is a far-reaching global problem. The recent outbreaks of Zika virus, Ebola virus and Corona virus are examples of viral zoonosis, which occur more frequently due to globalization. In the case of a virus outbreak, it is helpful to know which host organism was the original carrier of the virus. Once the reservoir or intermediate host is known, it can be isolated to prevent further spreading of the viral infection. Recent approaches aim to predict a viral host based on the viral genome, often in combination with the potential host genome and arbitrarily selected features. These methods have a clear limitation in either the number of different hosts they can predict or the accuracy of their prediction. ResultsHere, we present a fast and accurate deep learning approach for viral host prediction, which is based on the viral genome sequence only. To ensure a high prediction accuracy, we developed an effective selection approach for the training data to avoid biases due to a highly unbalanced number of known sequences per virus-host combinations. We tested our deep neural network on three different virus species (influenza A, rabies lyssavirus, rotavirus A). We reached for each virus species an AUG between 0.93 and 0.98, outperforming previous approaches and allowing highly accurate predictions while only using fractions (100-400 bp) of the viral genome sequences. We show that deep neural networks are suitable to predict the host of a virus, even with a limited amount of sequences and highly unbalanced available data. The deep neural networks trained for this approach build the core of the virus-host predicting tool VIDHOP (Virus Deep learning HOst Prediction). AvailabilityThe trained models for the prediction of the host for the viruses influenza A, rabies lyssavirus, rotavirus A are implemented in the tool VIDHOP. This tool is freely available under https://github.com/flomock/vidhop. Supplementary informationSupplementary data are available at DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/UXT7N

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