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The long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are ubiquitous in organisms and play crucial role in a variety of biological processes and complex diseases. Emerging evidences suggest that lncRNAs interact with corresponding proteins to perform their regulatory functions. Therefore, identifying interacting lncRNA-protein pairs is the first step in understanding the function and mechanism of lncRNA. Since it is time-consuming and expensive to determine lncRNA-protein interactions by high-throughput experiments, more robust and accurate computational methods need to be developed. In this study, we developed a new sequence distributed representation learning based method for potential lncRNA-Protein Interactions Prediction, named LPI-Pred, which is inspired by the similarity between natural language and biological sequences. More specifically, lncRNA and protein sequences were divided into k -mer segmentation, which can be regard as "word" in natural language processing. Then, we trained out the RNA2vec and Pro2vec model using word2vec and human genome-wide lncRNA and protein sequences to mine distribution representation of RNA and protein. Then, the dimension of complex features is reduced by using feature selection based on Gini information impurity measure. Finally, these discriminative features are used to train a Random Forest classifier to predict lncRNA-protein interactions. Five-fold cross-validation was adopted to evaluate the performance of LPI-Pred on three benchmark datasets, including RPI369, RPI488 and RPI2241. The results demonstrate that LPI-Pred can be a useful tool to provide reliable guidance for biological research., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (© 2019 The Authors.)

Many life activities and key functions in organisms are maintained by different types of protein⁻protein interactions (PPIs). In order to accelerate the discovery of PPIs for different species, many computational methods have been developed. Unfortunately, even though computational methods are constantly evolving, efficient methods for predicting PPIs from protein sequence information have not been found for many years due to limiting factors including both methodology and technology. Inspired by the similarity of biological sequences and languages, developing a biological language processing technology may provide a brand new theoretical perspective and feasible method for the study of biological sequences. In this paper, a pure biological language processing model is proposed for predicting protein⁻protein interactions only using a protein sequence. The model was constructed based on a feature representation method for biological sequences called bio-to-vector (Bio2Vec) and a convolution neural network (CNN). The Bio2Vec obtains protein sequence features by using a "bio-word" segmentation system and a word representation model used for learning the distributed representation for each "bio-word". The Bio2Vec supplies a frame that allows researchers to consider the context information and implicit semantic information of a bio sequence. A remarkable improvement in PPIs prediction performance has been observed by using the proposed model compared with state-of-the-art methods. The presentation of this approach marks the start of "bio language processing technology," which could cause a technological revolution and could be applied to improve the quality of predictions in other problems.

The interactions between non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) and proteins play an important role in many biological processes, and their biological functions are primarily achieved by binding with a variety of proteins. High-throughput biological techniques are used to identify protein molecules bound with specific ncRNA, but they are usually expensive and time consuming. Deep learning provides a powerful solution to computationally predict RNA-protein interactions. In this work, we propose the RPI-SAN model by using the deep-learning stacked auto-encoder network to mine the hidden high-level features from RNA and protein sequences and feed them into a random forest (RF) model to predict ncRNA binding proteins. Stacked assembling is further used to improve the accuracy of the proposed method. Four benchmark datasets, including RPI2241, RPI488, RPI1807, and NPInter v2.0, were employed for the unbiased evaluation of five established prediction tools: RPI-Pred, IPMiner, RPISeq-RF, lncPro, and RPI-SAN. The experimental results show that our RPI-SAN model achieves much better performance than other methods, with accuracies of 90.77%, 89.7%, 96.1%, and 99.33%, respectively. It is anticipated that RPI-SAN can be used as an effective computational tool for future biomedical researches and can accurately predict the potential ncRNA-protein interacted pairs, which provides reliable guidance for biological research., (Copyright © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)