An interpretable RNA foundation model for exploring functional RNA motifs in plants

The complex 'language' of plant RNA encodes a vast array of biological regulatory elements that orchestrate crucial aspects of plant growth, development and adaptation to environmental stresses. Recent advancements in foundation models (FMs) have demonstrated their unprecedented potential to decipher complex 'language' in biology. In this study, we introduced PlantRNA-FM, a high-performance and interpretable RNA FM specifically designed for plants. PlantRNA-FM was pretrained on an extensive dataset, integrating RNA sequences and RNA structure information from 1,124 distinct plant species. PlantRNA-FM exhibits superior performance in plant-specific downstream tasks. PlantRNA-FM achieves an F1 score of 0.974 for genic region annotation, whereas the current best-performing model achieves 0.639. Our PlantRNA-FM is empowered by our interpretable framework that facilitates the identification of biologically functional RNA sequence and structure motifs, including both RNA secondary and tertiary structure motifs across transcriptomes. Through experimental validations, we revealed translation-associated RNA motifs in plants. Our PlantRNA-FM also highlighted the importance of the position information of these functional RNA motifs in genic regions. Taken together, our PlantRNA-FM facilitates the exploration of functional RNA motifs across the complexity of transcriptomes, empowering plant scientists with capabilities for programming RNA codes in plants.