CoCoNet: Boosting RNA contact prediction by convolutional neural networks

Abstract

Physics-based co-evolutionary models such as direct coupling analysis (DCA) in combination with machine learning (ML) techniques based on deep neural networks are able to predict protein contact maps with astonishing accuracy. Such contacts can be used as constraints in structure prediction and massively increase prediction accuracy. Unfortunately, the same ML methods cannot readily be applied to RNA as they rely on large structural datasets only available for proteins but not for RNAs. Here, we demonstrate how the small amount of data available for RNA can be used to significantly improve prediction of RNA contact maps. We introduce an algorithm called CoCoNet that is based on a combination of a Coevolutionary model and a shallow Convolutional Neural Network. Despite its simplicity and the small number of trained parameters, the method boosts the contact prediction accuracy by about 70% with respect to straightforward DCA as tested by cross-validation on a dataset of about sixty RNA structures. Both our extensive robustness tests and the limited number of parameters allow the generalization properties of our model. Finally, applications to other RNAs highlight the power of our approach. CoCoNet is freely available and can be found at https://github.com/KIT-MBS/coconet.