CREaTor: zero-shot cis-regulatory pattern modeling with attention mechanisms

Abstract Linking cis-regulatory sequences to target genes has been a long-standing challenge. In this study, we introduce CREaTor, an attention-based deep neural network designed to model cis-regulatory patterns for genomic elements up to 2 Mb from target genes. Coupled with a training strategy that...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Yongge Li, Fusong Ju, Zhiyuan Chen, Yiming Qu, Huanhuan Xia, Liang He, Lijun Wu, Jianwei Zhu, Bin Shao, Pan Deng
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: BMC 2023-11-01
Series:Genome Biology
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-023-03103-8
Description
Summary:Abstract Linking cis-regulatory sequences to target genes has been a long-standing challenge. In this study, we introduce CREaTor, an attention-based deep neural network designed to model cis-regulatory patterns for genomic elements up to 2 Mb from target genes. Coupled with a training strategy that predicts gene expression from flanking candidate cis-regulatory elements (cCREs), CREaTor can model cell type-specific cis-regulatory patterns in new cell types without prior knowledge of cCRE-gene interactions or additional training. The zero-shot modeling capability, combined with the use of only RNA-seq and ChIP-seq data, allows for the ready generalization of CREaTor to a broad range of cell types.
ISSN:1474-760X