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Extracting offshore aquaculture areas from high-resolution remote sensing images is significant for rational planning and dynamic management of aquaculture. However, the complex and changeable characteristics of aquaculture areas will lead to difficulty during high-resolution image processing. In this paper, an improved U-Net deep learning model is proposed to extract offshore aquaculture areas from high-resolution images. This model is improved by the pyramid pooling module (PPM) and up-sampling structure based on the original U-Net model. PPM and the up-sampling structure can better mine semantic and position information in high-resolution images, reduce the interference and adhesion of information in images, and improve the extraction accuracy of unclear aquaculture areas. Based on Gaofen-2 remote sensing image data of Rongcheng Bay in the eastern waters of Weihai City, Shandong Province, the extraction of offshore aquaculture areas is studied. The results show that the F1 score and MIoU of the proposed network model are 93.63% and 87.93%, respectively. Compared with several commonly used deep learning models, the improved U-Net model has a better extraction effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging evidence has proved that circular RNAs (circRNAs) are implicated in pathogenic processes. They are regarded as promising biomarkers for diagnosis due to covalently closed loop structures. As opposed to traditional experiments, computational approaches can identify circRNA–disease associations at a lower cost. Aggregating multi-source pathogenesis data helps to alleviate data sparsity and infer potential associations at the system level. The majority of computational approaches construct a homologous network using multi-source data, but they lose the heterogeneity of the data. Effective methods that use the features of multi-source data are considered as a matter of urgency. In this paper, we propose a model (CDHGNN) based on edge-weighted graph attention and heterogeneous graph neural networks for potential circRNA–disease association prediction. The circRNA network, micro RNA network, disease network and heterogeneous network are constructed based on multi-source data. To reflect association probabilities between nodes, an edge-weighted graph attention network model is designed for node features. To assign attention weights to different types of edges and learn contextual meta-path, CDHGNN infers potential circRNA–disease association based on heterogeneous neural networks. CDHGNN outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of accuracy. Edge-weighted graph attention networks and heterogeneous graph networks have both improved performance significantly. Furthermore, case studies suggest that CDHGNN is capable of identifying specific molecular associations and investigating biomolecular regulatory relationships in pathogenesis. The code of CDHGNN is freely available at https://github.com/BioinformaticsCSU/CDHGNN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are reverse-spliced and covalently closed RNAs. Their interactions with RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) have multiple effects on the progress of many diseases. Some computational methods are proposed to identify RBP binding sites on circRNAs but suffer from insufficient accuracy, robustness and explanation. In this study, we first take the characteristics of both RNA and RBP into consideration. We propose a method for discriminating c ircRNA- R BP binding sites based on m ulti-scale characterizing s equence and s tructure features, called CRMSS. For circRNAs, we use sequence |${k}\hbox{-}{mer}$| embedding and the forming probabilities of local secondary structures as features. For RBPs, we combine sequence and structure frequencies of RNA-binding domain regions to generate features. We capture binding patterns with multi-scale residual blocks. With BiLSTM and attention mechanism, we obtain the contextual information of high-level representation for circRNA-RBP binding. To validate the effectiveness of CRMSS, we compare its predictive performance with other methods on 37 RBPs. Taking the properties of both circRNAs and RBPs into account, CRMSS achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods. In the case study, our model provides reliable predictions and correctly identifies experimentally verified circRNA-RBP pairs. The code of CRMSS is freely available at https://github.com/BioinformaticsCSU/CRMSS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subcellular localization of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) is crucial for understanding lncRNA functions. Most of existing lncRNA subcellular localization prediction methods use k -mer frequency features to encode lncRNA sequences. However, k -mer frequency features lose sequence order information and fail to capture sequence patterns and motifs of different lengths. In this paper, we proposed GraphLncLoc, a graph convolutional network-based deep learning model, for predicting lncRNA subcellular localization. Unlike previous studies encoding lncRNA sequences by using k -mer frequency features, GraphLncLoc transforms lncRNA sequences into de Bruijn graphs, which transforms the sequence classification problem into a graph classification problem. To extract the high-level features from the de Bruijn graph, GraphLncLoc employs graph convolutional networks to learn latent representations. Then, the high-level feature vectors derived from de Bruijn graph are fed into a fully connected layer to perform the prediction task. Extensive experiments show that GraphLncLoc achieves better performance than traditional machine learning models and existing predictors. In addition, our analyses show that transforming sequences into graphs has more distinguishable features and is more robust than k -mer frequency features. The case study shows that GraphLncLoc can uncover important motifs for nucleus subcellular localization. GraphLncLoc web server is available at http://csuligroup.com:8000/GraphLncLoc/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are a class of RNA molecules with more than 200 nucleotides. A growing amount of evidence reveals that subcellular localization of lncRNAs can provide valuable insights into their biological functions. Existing computational methods for predicting lncRNA subcellular localization use k -mer features to encode lncRNA sequences. However, the sequence order information is lost by using only k -mer features. We proposed a deep learning framework, DeepLncLoc, to predict lncRNA subcellular localization. In DeepLncLoc, we introduced a new subsequence embedding method that keeps the order information of lncRNA sequences. The subsequence embedding method first divides a sequence into some consecutive subsequences and then extracts the patterns of each subsequence, last combines these patterns to obtain a complete representation of the lncRNA sequence. After that, a text convolutional neural network is employed to learn high-level features and perform the prediction task. Compared with traditional machine learning models, popular representation methods and existing predictors, DeepLncLoc achieved better performance, which shows that DeepLncLoc could effectively predict lncRNA subcellular localization. Our study not only presented a novel computational model for predicting lncRNA subcellular localization but also introduced a new subsequence embedding method which is expected to be applied in other sequence-based prediction tasks. The DeepLncLoc web server is freely accessible at http://bioinformatics.csu.edu.cn/DeepLncLoc/ , and source code and datasets can be downloaded from https://github.com/CSUBioGroup/DeepLncLoc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivation: Emerging studies indicate that circular RNAs (circRNAs) are widely involved in the progression of human diseases. Due to its special structure which is stable, circRNAs are promising diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers for diseases. However, the experimental verification of circRNA-disease associations is expensive and limited to small-scale. Effective computational methods for predicting potential circRNA-disease associations are regarded as a matter of urgency. Although several models have been proposed, over-reliance on known associations and the absence of characteristics of biological functions make precise predictions are still challenging., Results: In this study, we propose a method for predicting CircRNA-disease associations based on sequence and ontology representations, named CDASOR, with convolutional and recurrent neural networks. For sequences of circRNAs, we encode them with continuous k-mers, get low-dimensional vectors of k-mers, extract their local feature vectors with 1D CNN and learn their long-term dependencies with bi-directional long short-term memory. For diseases, we serialize disease ontology into sentences containing the hierarchy of ontology, obtain low-dimensional vectors for disease ontology terms and get terms' dependencies. Furthermore, we get association patterns of circRNAs and diseases from known circRNA-disease associations with neural networks. After the above steps, we get circRNAs' and diseases' high-level representations, which are informative to improve the prediction. The experimental results show that CDASOR provides an accurate prediction. Importing the characteristics of biological functions, CDASOR achieves impressive predictions in the de novo test. In addition, 6 of the top-10 predicted results are verified by the published literature in the case studies., Availability and Implementation: The code and data of CDASOR are freely available at https://github.com/BioinformaticsCSU/CDASOR., (© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

Motivation: Emerging evidence presents that traditional drug discovery experiment is time-consuming and high costs. Computational drug repositioning plays a critical role in saving time and resources for drug research and discovery. Therefore, developing more accurate and efficient approaches is imperative. Heterogeneous graph inference is a classical method in computational drug repositioning, which not only has high convergence precision, but also has fast convergence speed. However, the method has not fully considered the sparsity of heterogeneous association network. In addition, rough similarity measure can reduce the performance in identifying drug-associated indications., Results: In this article, we propose a heterogeneous graph inference with matrix completion (HGIMC) method to predict potential indications for approved and novel drugs. First, we use a bounded matrix completion (BMC) model to prefill a part of the missing entries in original drug-disease association matrix. This step can add more positive and formative drug-disease edges between drug network and disease network. Second, Gaussian radial basis function (GRB) is employed to improve the drug and disease similarities since the performance of heterogeneous graph inference more relies on similarity measures. Next, based on the updated drug-disease associations and new similarity measures of drug and disease, we construct a novel heterogeneous drug-disease network. Finally, HGIMC utilizes the heterogeneous network to infer the scores of unknown association pairs, and then recommend the promising indications for drugs. To evaluate the performance of our method, HGIMC is compared with five state-of-the-art approaches of drug repositioning in the 10-fold cross-validation and de novo tests. As the numerical results shown, HGIMC not only achieves a better prediction performance but also has an excellent computation efficiency. In addition, cases studies also confirm the effectiveness of our method in practical application., Availabilityand Implementation: The HGIMC software and data are freely available at https://github.com/BioinformaticsCSU/HGIMC, https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/yangmy84/hgimc and http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4285640., Supplementary Information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online., (© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

Objective: To evaluate the correlation of uterotrophic assay in immature mice and E-SCREEN assay for estrogenic activities using 17beta-estradiol (17beta-E2) and four botanical extracts (Fructus Foeniculi, Fructus Psoraleae, Radix Cyathulae and Radix Sophorae Tonkinensis)., Methods: Weanling female Kunming mice weighed 10 - 12 g were given botanical extracts (10 g/kg BW, i.g) and 17beta-E2 (0.5 mg/kg BW, s.c), respectively, for 9 days. Uterine and ovary weights of mice were measured after killed. Human breast cancer MCF-7 cells were cultured and treated with botanical extracts (final concentration: 10 mg/L) and 17beta-E2 (final concentration: 0.3 micromol/L) for 120 h, respectively. The doubling time of cell growth was calculated and analyzed its correlation with average uterine weights obtained from uterotrophic assay. Results Four botanical extracts, as well as 17beta-E2, increased uterine weights of mice significantly (P < 0.05 or P < 0.01) and shortened the doubling time of cell growth. And uterine weights were inversely correlated with the doubling time of cell growth (r = -0.967, P < 0.01)., Conclusion: The result of uterotrophic assay in immature mice was consistent with that of E-SCREEN assay when evaluating estrogenic activities.

The effectiveness of carotenoids as antioxidants is dependent on a number of influencing factors. It is likely that carotenoids exhibit a tendency to lose their effectiveness as antioxidants or act as prooxidants. In this paper, factors influencing the antioxidant or prooxidant activities of carotenoids such as the molecule structure of carotenoids, the location or site of action of the carotenoid molecule within the cell, the concentration of carotenoids, the properties of reactants, the partial pressure of oxygen and the interaction with other antioxidants were reviewed.