Project description:Chemical RNA modifications, collectively referred to as the ‘epitranscriptome’, have been intensively studied during the last years, largely facilitated by the use of next-generation sequencing technologies. Recent efforts have turned towards the nanopore direct RNA sequencing (DRS) platform, as it allows simultaneous detection of diverse RNA modification types in full-length native RNA molecules. While RNA modifications can be identified in the form of systematic basecalling ‘errors’ in DRS datasets, m6A modifications produce very modest ‘errors’, limiting the applicability of this approach to sites that are modified at high stoichiometries. Here, we demonstrate that the use of alternative RNA basecalling models, trained with fully-unmodified in vitro synthetic sequences, increase the ‘error’ signal of m6A modifications, leading to enhanced detection of RNA modifications even at lower stoichiometries. We then show that the use of these models enhances the detection of RNA modifications on previously published in vivo human samples, using third-party softwares for the detection of RNA modifications. Moreover, our work provides a novel RNA basecalling model that shows a median accuracy of 97%, compared to previously available RNA basecalling models that show 91% accuracy. Notably, this increase in accuracy does not only lead to improved detection of RNA modifications, but also enhanced mappability of RNA reads, which becomes more evident in the case of short RNA reads (50% increase). Altogether, our work stresses the importance of using fully unmodified RNA sequences for training RNA basecalling models, and how the use of different basecalling models can significantly affect the detection of RNA modifications and read mappability.
Project description:We leverage machine learning approaches to adapt nanopore sequencing basecallers for nucleotide modification detection. We first apply the incremental learning technique to improve the basecalling of modification-rich sequences, which are usually of high biological interests. With sequence backbones resolved, we further run anomaly detection on individual nucleotides to determine their modification status. By this means, our pipeline promises the single-molecule, single-nucleotide and sequence context-free detection of modifications. We benchmark the pipeline using control oligos, further apply it in the basecalling of densely-modified yeast tRNAs and E.coli genomic DNAs, the cross-species detection of N6-methyladenosine (m6A) in mammalian mRNAs, and the simultaneous detection of N1-methyladenosine (m1A) and m6A in human mRNAs. Our IL-AD workflow is available at: https://github.com/wangziyuan66/IL-AD.
Project description:We leverage machine learning approaches to adapt nanopore sequencing basecallers for nucleotide modification detection. We first apply the incremental learning (IL) technique to improve the basecalling of modification-rich sequences, which are usually of high biological interest. With sequence backbones resolved, we further run anomaly detection (AD) on individual nucleotides to determine their modification status. By this means, our pipeline promises the single-molecule, single-nucleotide, and sequence context-free detection of modifications. We benchmark the pipeline using control oligos, further apply it in the basecalling of densely-modified yeast tRNAs and E.coli genomic DNAs, the cross-species detection of N6-methyladenosine (m6A) in mammalian mRNAs, and the simultaneous detection of N1-methyladenosine (m1A) and m6A in human mRNAs. Our IL-AD workflow is available at: https://github.com/wangziyuan66/IL-AD .
Project description:We describe an improved individual nucleotide resolution CLIP protocol (iiCLIP), which can be completed within 4 days from UV crosslinking to libraries for sequencing. For benchmarking, we directly compared PTBP1 iiCLIP libraries with the iCLIP2 protocol produced under standardised conditions with 1 million HEK293 cells, and with public eCLIP and iCLIP PTBP1 data. There are 3 PTBP1 iiCLIP libraries, 1 input iiCLIP library and 1 PTBP1 iCLIP2 library produced in this study.