Improving the Caenorhabditis elegans Genome Annotation Using Machine Learning

Abstract

For modern biology, precise genome annotations are of prime importance, as they allow the accurate definition of genic regions. We employ state-of-the-art machine learning methods to assay and improve the accuracy of the genome annotation of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. The proposed machine learning system is trained to recognize exons and introns on the unspliced mRNA, utilizing recent advances in support vector machines and label sequence learning. In 87% (coding and untranslated regions) and 95% (coding regions only) of all genes tested in several out-of-sample evaluations, our method correctly identified all exons and introns. Notably, only 37% and 50%, respectively, of the presently unconfirmed genes in the C. elegans genome annotation agree with our predictions, thus we hypothesize that a sizable fraction of those genes are not correctly annotated. A retrospective evaluation of the Wormbase WS120 annotation [1] of C. elegans reveals that splice form predictions on unconfirmed genes in WS120 are inaccurate in about 18% of the considered cases, while our predictions deviate from the truth only in 10%–13%. We experimentally analyzed 20 controversial genes on which our system and the annotation disagree, confirming the superiority of our predictions. While our method correctly predicted 75% of those cases, the standard annotation was never completely correct. The accuracy of our system is further corroborated by a comparison with two other recently proposed systems that can be used for splice form prediction: SNAP and ExonHunter. We conclude that the genome annotation of C. elegans and other organisms can be greatly enhanced using modern machine learning technology. Eukaryotic genes contain introns, which are intervening sequences that are excised from a gene transcript with the concomitant ligation of flanking segments called exons. The process of removing introns is called splicing. It involves biochemical mechanisms that to date are too complex to be modeled comprehensively and accurately. However, abundant sequencing results can serve as a blueprint database exemplifying what this process accomplishes. Using this database, we employ discriminative machine learning techniques to predict the mature mRNA given the unspliced pre-mRNA. Our method utilizes support vector machines and recent advances in label sequence learning, originally developed for natural language processing. The system, called mSplicer, was trained and evaluated on the genome of the nematode C. elegans, a well-studied model organism. We were able to show that mSplicer correctly predicts the splice form in most cases. Surprisingly, our predictions on currently unconfirmed genes deviate considerably from the public genome annotation. It is hypothesized that a sizable fraction of those genes are not correctly annotated. A retrospective evaluation and additional sequencing results show the superiority of mSplicer's predictions. It is concluded that the annotation of nematode and other genomes can be greatly enhanced using modern machine learning.