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Wong, K.-C.

Publications and source records attributed to Wong, K.-C..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

Drug Response Modeling across Cancers: Proteomics vs. Transcriptomics

Cancer cell lines are the most common in-vitro models for the evaluation of anti-cancer drug sensitivities. Past studies have been conducted to decipher and characterize the pharmacogenomic feature of cell lines based on other omics data, such as genomic mutation data and whole-genome RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) profiles. In particular, proteomic data is also an essential component for the characterization of tumours. However, different from RNA-seq datasets rich in numerous transcriptome profiles of cancer cell lines and cell viability assay of drug responses, the pharmacogenomic protein quantifications are relatively scarce. With the availability of the recently enriched proteomic dataset ProCan-DepMapSanger, we systematically evaluated the interplays among genomic mutations, transcription, and protein expressions across cancer cell lines. In general, blood cancers have higher RNA-protein correlations than those in solid cancers. The differential expression analysis on protein data helped identify more expressional and functional impact of genomic mutations of cancer genes. We also integrated the proteomic map with drug molecular chemical features to construct a bi-modal machine learning model to infer the drug sensitivities of cancer cell lines. Our results demonstrated that protein quantifications can lead to better drug response prediction performance than the model trained on transcriptome profiles. In addition, integrating protein data with drug chemical features, represented as molecular graphs and learned by Graph Neural Network, outperformed the state-of-the-art model DeepOmicNet for drug response prediction in proteomics.

bioinformatics↗

Unveiling multi-scale architectural features in single-cell Hi-C data using scCAFE

Single-cell Hi-C (scHi-C) has provided unprecedented insights into the heterogeneity of 3D genome organization. However, its sparse and noisy nature poses challenges for computational analyses, such as chromatin architectural feature identification. Here, we introduce scCAFE, a deep learning model for the multi-scale detection of architectural features at the single-cell level. scCAFE provides a unified framework for annotating chromatin loops, TAD-like domains (TLDs), and compartments across individual cells. Our model outperforms previous scHi-C loop calling methods and delivers accurate predictions of TLDs and compartments that are biologically consistent with previous studies. The resulting single-cell annotations also offer a measure to characterize the heterogeneity of different levels of architectural features across cell types. We leverage this heterogeneity and identify a series of marker loop anchors, which demonstrate the potential of the 3D genome data to annotate cell identities without the aid of simultaneously sequenced omics data. Overall, scCAFE not only serves as a useful tool for analyzing single-cell genomic architecture, but also paves the way for precise cell-type annotations solely based on 3D genome features.

bioinformatics↗

UniPTM: Multiple PTM site prediction on full-length protein sequence

AbstractPost-translational modifications (PTMs) enrich the functional diversity of proteins by attaching chemical groups to the side chains of amino acids. In recent years, a myr-iad of AI models have been proposed to predict many specific types of PTMs. However, those models typically adopt the sliding window approach to extract short and equal-length protein fragments from full-length proteins for model training. Unfortunately, such a subtle step results in the loss of long-range information from distal amino acids, which may impact the PTM formation process. In this study, we introduce UniPTM, a window-free model designed to train and test on natural and full-length protein sequences, enabling the prediction of multiple types of PTMs in a holistic manner. Moreover, we established PTMseq, the first comprehensive dataset of full-length pro-tein sequences with annotated PTMs, to train and validate our model. UniPTM has undergone extensive validations and significantly outperforms existing models, eluci-dating the influence of protein sequence completeness on PTM. Consequently, UniPTM offers interpretable and biologically meaningful predictions, enhancing our understand-ing of protein functionally and regulation. The source code and PTMseq dataset for UniPTM are available at https://www.github.com/TransPTM/UniPTM.

bioinformatics↗

DeepMotifSyn: a deep learning approach to synthesize heterodimeric DNA motifs

MotivationThe cooperativity of transcription factors (TFs) is a widespread phenomenon in the gene regulation system. However, the interaction patterns between TF binding motifs remain elusive. The recent high-throughput assays, CAP-SELEX, have identified over 600 composite DNA sites (i.e. heterodimeric motifs) bound by cooperative TF pairs. However, there are over 25,000 inferentially effective heterodimeric TFs in human cell. It is not practically feasible to validate all heterodimeric motifs due to cost and labour. Therefore, it is highly demanding to develop a fast and accurate computational tool for heterodimeric motif synthesis. ResultsWe introduce DeepMotifSyn, a deep-learning-based tool for synthesizing heterodimeric motifs from monomeric motif pairs. Specifically, DeepMotifSyn is composed of heterodimeric motif generator and evaluator. The generator is a U-Net-based neural network that can synthesize heterodimeric motifs from aligned motif pairs. The evaluator is a machine-learning-based model that can score the generated heterodimeric motif candidates based on the motif sequence features. Systematic evaluations on CAP-SELEX data illustrates that DeepMotif-Syn significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art predictors. In addition, DeepMotifSyn can synthesize multiple heterodimeric motifs with different orientation and spacing settings. Such a feature can address the shortcomings of previous models. We believe Deep-MotifSyn is a more practical and reliable model than current predictors on heterodimeric motif synthesis. Availability and implementationThe software is freely available at https://github.com/JasonLinjc/deepMotifSyn.

bioinformatics↗