Huang Xindi, Jiang Jipu, Shi Lifen, Yan Cheng
School of Informatics, Hunan University of Chinese Medicine, Changsha, China.
Front Genet. 2025 Jun 19;16:1623008. doi: 10.3389/fgene.2025.1623008. eCollection 2025.
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play a crucial role in regulating gene expression, and their subcellular localization is essential for understanding their biological functions. However, accurately predicting miRNA subcellular localization remains a challenging task due to their short sequences, complex structures, and diverse functions. To improve prediction accuracy, this study proposes a novel model based on a graph transformer and a multi-head attention mechanism. The model integrates multi-source features which include the miRNA sequence similarity network, miRNA functional similarity network, miRNA-mRNA association network, miRNA-drug association network, and miRNA-disease association network. Specifically, we first apply the node2vec algorithm to extract features from these biological networks. Then, we use a graph transformer to capture relationships between nodes within the networks, enabling a better understanding of miRNA functions across different biological contexts. Next, a multi-head attention mechanism is implemented to combine miRNA features from multiple networks, allowing the model to capture deeper feature relationships and enhance prediction performance. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed method achieves significant improvements over current approaches on open-access datasets, achieving high performance with an AUC (area of receiver operating characteristic curve) of 0.9108 and AUPR(area of precision-recall curve) of 0.8102. It not only significantly improves prediction accuracy but also exhibits strong generalization and stability.
微小RNA(miRNA)在调节基因表达中起着关键作用,其亚细胞定位对于理解其生物学功能至关重要。然而,由于miRNA序列短、结构复杂且功能多样,准确预测miRNA亚细胞定位仍然是一项具有挑战性的任务。为了提高预测准确性,本研究提出了一种基于图变换器和多头注意力机制的新型模型。该模型整合了多源特征,包括miRNA序列相似性网络、miRNA功能相似性网络、miRNA-mRNA关联网络、miRNA-药物关联网络和miRNA-疾病关联网络。具体而言,我们首先应用node2vec算法从这些生物网络中提取特征。然后,我们使用图变换器来捕捉网络内节点之间的关系,从而更好地理解miRNA在不同生物背景下的功能。接下来,实施多头注意力机制以组合来自多个网络的miRNA特征,使模型能够捕捉更深层次的特征关系并提高预测性能。性能评估表明,所提出的方法在开放获取数据集上比当前方法有显著改进,在AUC(受试者工作特征曲线面积)为0.9108和AUPR(精确召回曲线面积)为0.8102的情况下实现了高性能。它不仅显著提高了预测准确性,还表现出强大的泛化能力和稳定性。