Prediction of sgRNA on-target activity in bacteria by deep learning

One of the main challenges for the CRISPR-Cas9 system is selecting optimal single-guide RNAs (sgRNAs). Recently, deep learning has enhanced sgRNA prediction in eukaryotes. However, the prokaryotic chromatin structure is different from eukaryotes, so models trained on eukaryotes may not apply to prokaryotes.

We designed and implemented a convolutional neural network to predict sgRNA activity in Escherichia coli. The network was trained and tested on the recently-released sgRNA activity dataset. Our convolutional neural network achieved excellent performance, yielding average Spearman correlation coefficients of 0.5817, 0.7105, and 0.3602, respectively for Cas9, eSpCas9 and Cas9 with a recA coding region deletion. We confirmed that the sgRNA prediction models trained on prokaryotes do not apply to eukaryotes and vice versa. We adopted perturbation-based approaches to analyze distinct biological patterns between prokaryotic and eukaryotic editing. Then, we improved the predictive performance of the prokaryotic Cas9 system by transfer learning. Finally, we determined that potential off-target scores accumulated on a genome-wide scale affect on-target activity, which could slightly improve on-target predictive performance.

We developed convolutional neural networks to predict sgRNA activity for wild type and mutant Cas9 in prokaryotes. Our results show that the prediction accuracy of our method is improved over state-of-the-art models.