RCK
Finding RNA structure in the unstructured RBPome
Publication:
Y. Orenstein, U. Ohler, B. Berger (2018) Finding RNA structure in the unstructured RBPome BMC Genomics.
Improved binding prediction from amino acid sequence by utilizing RNA structure. a) When we add RNA structural features to the sequence k-mer space of AffinityRegression, we predict binding significantly better than using sequence features alone. b) When we add RNA structural features to the sequence k-mer space of AffinityRegression, we predict the top-bound probes as compared to unbound probes significantly better than using sequence features alone
Abstract
RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) play vital roles in many processes in the cell. Different RBPs bind RNA with different sequence and structure specificities. While sequence specificities for a large set of 205 RBPs have been reported through the RNAcompete compendium, structure specificities are known for only a small fraction. The main limitation lies in the design of the RNAcompete technology, which tests RBP binding against unstructured RNA probes, making it difficult to infer structural preferences from these data. We recently developed RCK, an algorithm to infer sequence and structural binding models from RNAcompete data. The set of binding models enables, for the first time, a large-scale assessment of RNA structure in the RBPome.
We re-validate and uncover the role of RNA structure in the RPBome through novel analysis of the largest-scale dataset to date. First, we show that RNA structure exists in presumably unstructured RNA probes and that its variability is correlated with RNA-binding. Second, we examine the structural binding preferences of RBPs and discover an overall preference to bind RNA loops. Third, we significantly improve protein-binding prediction using RNA structure, both in vitro and in vivo. Lastly, we demonstrate that RNA structural binding preferences can be inferred for new proteins from solely their amino acid content.
Downloads
RNAcompete (public access open): http://hugheslab.ccbr.utoronto.ca/supplementary-data/RNAcompete_eukarya/
eCLIP (public access open): https://www.encodeproject.org/search/?type=Experiment&assay_title=eCLIP
RCK binding models (public access open): rck.csail.mit.edu