Directed acyclic graph kernels for structural RNA analysis

Kengo Sato¹^,2^,3 , Toutai Mituyama² , Kiyoshi Asai⁴^,2 and Yasubumi Sakakibara³^,2

¹Japan Biological Informatics Consortium (JBIC), 2-45 Aomi, Koto-ku, Tokyo 135-8073, Japan

²Computational Biology Research Center (CBRC), National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), 2-42 Aomi, Koto-ku, Tokyo 135-0064, Japan

³Department of Biosciences and Informatics, Keio University, 3-14-1 Hiyoshi, Kohoku-ku, Yokohama, Kanagawa 223-8522, Japan

⁴Department of Computational Biology, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo, 5-1-5 Kashiwanoha, Kashiwa, Chiba 277-8561, Japan

author email corresponding author email

BMC Bioinformatics 2008, 9:318doi:10.1186/1471-2105-9-318


Published:	22 July 2008

Abstract

Background

Recent discoveries of a large variety of important roles for non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) have been reported by numerous researchers. In order to analyze ncRNAs by kernel methods including support vector machines, we propose stem kernels as an extension of string kernels for measuring the similarities between two RNA sequences from the viewpoint of secondary structures. However, applying stem kernels directly to large data sets of ncRNAs is impractical due to their computational complexity.

Results

We have developed a new technique based on directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) derived from base-pairing probability matrices of RNA sequences that significantly increases the computation speed of stem kernels. Furthermore, we propose profile-profile stem kernels for multiple alignments of RNA sequences which utilize base-pairing probability matrices for multiple alignments instead of those for individual sequences. Our kernels outperformed the existing methods with respect to the detection of known ncRNAs and kernel hierarchical clustering.

Conclusion

Stem kernels can be utilized as a reliable similarity measure of structural RNAs, and can be used in various kernel-based applications.