i6mA-Pred: identifying DNA N6-methyladenine sites in the rice genome

DNA N6-methyladenine (6mA) is associated with a wide range of biological processes. Since the distribution of 6mA site in the genome is non-random, accurate identification of 6mA sites is crucial for understanding its biological functions. Although experimental methods have been proposed for this regard, they are still cost-ineffective for detecting 6mA site in genome-wide scope. Therefore, it is desirable to develop computational methods to facilitate the identification of 6mA site.

In this study, a computational method called i6mA-Pred was developed to identify 6mA sites in the rice genome, in which the optimal nucleotide chemical properties obtained by the using feature selection technique were used to encode the DNA sequences. It was observed that the i6mA-Pred yielded an accuracy of 83.13% in the jackknife test. Meanwhile, the performance of i6mA-Pred was also superior to other methods.

A user-friendly web-server, i6mA-Pred is freely accessible at http://lin-group.cn/server/i6mA-Pred.