Enhanced prediction of RNA solvent accessibility with long short-term memory neural networks and improved sequence profiles

Motivation The de novo prediction of RNA tertiary structure remains a grand challenge. Predicted RNA solvent accessibility provides an opportunity to address this challenge. To the best of our knowledge, there is only one method (RNAsnap) available for RNA solvent accessibility prediction. However, its performance is unsatisfactory for protein-free RNAs. Results We developed RNAsol, a new algorithm to predict RNA solvent accessibility. RNAsol was built based on improved sequence profiles from the covariance models and trained with the long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks. Independent tests on the same datasets from RNAsnap show that RNAsol achieves the mean Pearson's correlation coefficient (PCC) of 0.43/0.26 for the protein-bound/protein-free RNA molecules, which is 26.5%/136.4% higher than that of RNAsnap. When the training set is enlarged to include both types of RNAs, the PCCs increase to 0.49 and 0.46 for protein-bound and protein-free RNAs, respectively. The success of RNAsol is attributed to two aspects, including the improved sequence profiles constructed by the sequence-profile alignment and the enhanced training by the LSTM neural networks. Availability and implementation http://yanglab.nankai.edu.cn/RNAsol/ Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.