Multiple sequence alignment based on deep reinforcement learning with self-attention and positional encoding

MOTIVATION: Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) is one of the hotspots of current research and is commonly used in sequence analysis scenarios. However, there is no lasting solution for MSA because it is a Nondeterministic Polynomially complete problem, and the existing methods still have room to improve the accuracy. RESULTS: We propose Deep reinforcement learning with Positional encoding and self-Attention for MSA, based on deep reinforcement learning, to enhance the accuracy of the alignment Specifically, inspired by the translation technique in natural language processing, we introduce self-attention and positional encoding to improve accuracy and reliability. Firstly, positional encoding encodes the position of the sequence to prevent the loss of nucleotide position information. Secondly, the self-attention model is used to extract the key features of the sequence. Then input the features into a multi-layer perceptron, which can calculate the insertion position of the gap according to the features. In addition, a novel reinforcement learning environment is designed to convert the classic progressive alignment into progressive column alignment, gradually generating each column’s sub-alignment. Finally, merge the sub-alignment into the complete alignment. Extensive experiments based on several datasets validate our method’s effectiveness for MSA, outperforming some state-of-the-art methods in terms of the Sum-of-pairs and Column scores. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The process is implemented in Python and available as open-source software from https://github.com/ZhangLab312/DPAMSA.