iPTT(2 L)-CNN: A Two-Layer Predictor for Identifying Promoters and Their Types in Plant Genomes by Convolutional Neural Network

A promoter is a short DNA sequence near to the start codon, responsible for initiating transcription of a specific gene in genome. The accurate recognition of promoters has great significance for a better understanding of the transcriptional regulation. Because of their importance in the process of biological transcriptional regulation, there is an urgent need to develop in silico tools to identify promoters and their types timely and accurately. A number of prediction methods had been developed in this regard; however, almost all of them were merely used for identifying promoters and their strength or sigma types. Owing to that TATA box region in TATA promoter that influences posttranscriptional processes, in the current study, we developed a two-layer predictor called iPTT(2L)-CNN by using the convolutional neural network (CNN) for identifying TATA and TATA-less promoters. The first layer can be used to identify a given DNA sequence as a promoter or nonpromoter. The second layer is used to identify whether the recognized promoter is TATA promoter or not. The 5-fold crossvalidation and independent testing results demonstrate that the constructed predictor is promising for identifying promoter and classifying TATA and TATA-less promoter. Furthermore, to make it easier for most experimental scientists get the results they need, a user-friendly web server has been established at http://www.jci-bioinfo.cn/iPPT(2L)-CNN.