Related Experiment Video
Updated: Dec 21, 2025

Targeted DNA Methylation Analysis by Next-generation Sequencing
Published on: February 24, 2015
SOMM4mC: a second-order Markov model for DNA N4-methylcytosine site prediction in six species
Jiali Yang1,2, Kun Lang3, Guangle Zhang4
1Department of Mathematics, College of Science, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing 210095, China.
Motivation:
DNA N4-methylcytosine (4mC) modification is an important epigenetic modification in prokaryotic DNA due to its role in regulating DNA replication and protecting the host DNA against degradation. An efficient algorithm to identify 4mC sites is needed for downstream analyses.
Results:
In this study, we propose a new prediction method named SOMM4mC based on a second-order Markov model, which makes use of the transition probability between adjacent nucleotides to identify 4mC sites. The results show that the first-order and second-order Markov model are superior to the three existing algorithms in all six species (Caenorhabditis elegans, Drosophila melanogaster, Arabidopsis thaliana, Escherichia coli, Geoalkalibacter subterruneus and Geobacter pickeringii) where benchmark datasets are available. However, the classification performance of SOMM4mC is more outstanding than that of first-order Markov model. Especially, for E.coli and C.elegans, the overall accuracy of SOMM4mC are 91.8% and 87.6%, which are 8.5% and 6.1% higher than those of the latest method 4mcPred-SVM, respectively. This shows that more discriminant sequence information is captured by SOMM4mC through the dependency between adjacent nucleotides.
Availability And Implementation:
The web server of SOMM4mC is freely accessible at www.insect-genome.com/SOMM4mC.
Contact:
chenyuanyuan@njau.edu.cn or piancong@njau.edu.cn.
Related Concept Videos
Conserved Binding Sites
Binding sites are often located in large pockets, and if their location on a protein’s surface is unknown, it can be predicted using various approaches. The energetic method computationally...
Mismatch Repair
Mismatch Repair
The Mutator Protein Family Plays a Key Role in DNA Mismatch Repair
The human genome has more than 3 billion base pairs of DNA per cell. Prior to cell division, that vast amount of genetic...
Next-generation Sequencing
Next-Generation Sequencing Methods
Although all next-generation methods use different technologies, they all share a set of standard features....
Cis-regulatory Sequences
Maxam-Gilbert Sequencing
Challenges of the Maxam-Gilbert Method
The...

