DeepITEH: a deep learning framework for identifying tissue-specific eRNAs from the human genome

Enhancers are vital cis-regulatory elements that regulate gene expression. Enhancer RNAs (eRNAs), a type of long noncoding RNAs, are transcribed from enhancer regions in the genome. The tissue-specific expression of eRNAs is crucial in the regulation of gene expression and cancer development. The methods that identify eRNAs based solely on genomic sequence data have high error rates because they do not account for tissue specificity. Specific histone modifications associated with eRNAs offer valuable information for their identification. However, identification of eRNAs using histone modification data requires the use of both RNA-seq and histone modification data. Unfortunately, many public datasets contain only one of these components, which impedes the accurate identification of eRNAs.

We introduce DeepITEH, a deep learning framework that leverages RNA-seq data and histone modification data from multiple samples of the same tissue to enhance the accuracy of identifying eRNAs. Specifically, deepITEH initially categorizes eRNAs into two classes, namely, regularly expressed eRNAs and accidental eRNAs, using histone modification data from multiple samples of the same tissue. Thereafter, it integrates both sequence and histone modification features to identify eRNAs in specific tissues. To evaluate the performance of DeepITEH, we compared it with four existing state-of-the-art enhancer prediction methods, SeqPose, iEnhancer-RD, LSTMAtt, and FRL, on four normal tissues and four cancer tissues. Remarkably, seven of these tissues demonstrated a substantially improved specific eRNA prediction performance with DeepITEH, when compared with other methods. Our findings suggest that DeepITEH can effectively predict potential eRNAs on the human genome, providing insights for studying the eRNA function in cancer.

The source code and dataset of DeepITEH have been uploaded to https://github.com/lyli1013/DeepITEH.