Prediction of piRNAs using transposon interaction and a support vector machine

BACKGROUND: Piwi-interacting RNAs (piRNAs) are a class of small non-coding RNA primarily expressed in germ cells that can silence transposons at the post-transcriptional level. Accurate prediction of piRNAs remains a significant challenge. RESULTS: We developed a program for piRNA annotation (Piano) using piRNA-transposon interaction information. We downloaded 13,848 Drosophila piRNAs and 261,500 Drosophila transposons. The piRNAs were aligned to transposons with a maximum of three mismatches. Then, piRNA-transposon interactions were predicted by RNAplex. Triplet elements combining structure and sequence information were extracted from piRNA-transposon matching/pairing duplexes. A support vector machine (SVM) was used on these triplet elements to classify real and pseudo piRNAs, achieving 95.3 ± 0.33% accuracy and 96.0 ± 0.5% sensitivity. The SVM classifier can be used to correctly predict human, mouse and rat piRNAs, with overall accuracy of 90.6%. We used Piano to predict piRNAs for the rice stem borer, Chilo suppressalis, an important rice insect pest that causes huge yield loss. As a result, 82,639 piRNAs were predicted in C. suppressalis. CONCLUSIONS: Piano demonstrates excellent piRNA prediction performance by using both structure and sequence features of transposon-piRNAs interactions. Piano is freely available to the academic community at http://ento.njau.edu.cn/Piano.html. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12859-014-0419-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.