Graph Neural Networks for Z-DNA prediction in Genomes

Deep learning methods have been successfully applied to the tasks of predicting functional genomic elements such as histone marks, transcriptions factor binding sites, non-B DNA structures, and regulatory variants. Initially convolutional neural networks (CNN) and recurrent neural networks (RNN) or hybrid CNN-RNN models appeared to be the methods of choice for genomic studies. With the advance of machine learning algorithms other deep learning architectures started to outperform CNN and RNN in various applications. Graph neural network (GNN) applications improved the prediction of drug effects, disease associations, protein-protein interactions, protein structures and their functions. The performance of GNN is yet to be fully explored in genomics. Earlier we developed DeepZ approach in which deep learning model is trained on information both from sequence and omics data. Initially this approach was implemented with CNN and RNN but is not limited to these classes of neural networks. In this study we implemented the DeepZ approach by substituting RNN with GNN. We tested three different GNN architectures - Graph Convolutional Network (GCN), Graph Attention Network (GAT) and inductive representation learning network GraphSAGE. The GNN models outperformed current state-of the art RNN model from initial DeepZ realization. Graph SAGE showed the best performance for the small training set of human Z-DNA ChIP-seq data while Graph Convolutional Network was superior for specific curaxin-induced mouse Z-DNA data that was recently reported. Our results show the potential of GNN applications for the task of predicting genomic functional elements based on DNA sequence and omics data.Availability and implementation–The code is freely available at https://github.com/MrARVO/GraphZ.