iPromoter-5mC: A Novel Fusion Decision Predictor for the Identification of 5-Methylcytosine Sites in Genome-Wide DNA Promoters

The hypomethylation of the whole cancer genome and the hypermethylation of the promoter of specific tumor suppressor genes are the important reasons for the rapid proliferation of cancer cells. Therefore, obtaining the distribution of 5-methylcytosine (5mC) in promoters is a key step to further understand the relationship between promoter methylation and mRNA gene expression regulation. Large-scale detection of DNA 5mC through wet experiments is still time-consuming and laborious. Therefore, it is urgent to design a method for identifying the 5mC site of genome-wide DNA promoters. Based on promoter methylation data of the small cell lung cancer (SCLC) from the database named cancer cell line Encyclopedia (CCLE), we built a fusion decision predictor called iPromoter-5mC for identifying methylation modification sites in promoters using deep neural network (DNN). One-Hot Encoding (One-hot) was used to encode the promoter samples for the classification. The method achieves average AUC of 0.957 on the independent testing dataset, indicating that our predictor is robust and reliable. A user-friendly web-server called iPromoter-5mC could be freely accessible at http://www.jci-bioinfo.cn/iPromoter-5mC, which will provide simple and effective means for users to study promoter 5mC modification. The source code of the proposed methods is freely available for academic research at https://github.com/zlwuxi/iPromoter-5mC.