Soffritto: a deep learning model for predicting high-resolution replication timing

Replication timing (RT) refers to the order in which DNA loci are replicated during S phase. RT is cell-type specific and implicated in cellular processes including transcription, differentiation, and disease. RT is typically quantified genome-wide using two-fraction assays (e.g. Repli-Seq) which sort cells into early and late S phase fractions followed by DNA sequencing, yielding a ratio as the RT signal. While two-fraction RT data are widely available in multiple cell lines, it is limited in its ability to capture high-resolution RT features. To address this, high-resolution Repli-Seq, which quantifies RT across 16 fractions, was developed, but it is costly and technically challenging with very limited data generated to date.

Here, we developed Soffritto, a deep learning model that predicts high-resolution RT data using two-fraction RT data, histone ChIP-seq data, GC content, and gene density as input. Soffritto is composed of a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) module and a prediction module. The LSTM module learns long- and short-range interactions between genomic bins, while the prediction module is composed of a fully connected layer that outputs a 16-fraction probability vector for each bin using the LSTM module's embeddings as input. By performing both within cell line and cross-cell line training and testing for five human and mouse cell lines, we show that Soffritto is able to capture experimental 16-fraction RT signals with high accuracy, and the predicted signals allow detection of high-resolution RT patterns.

Soffritto is available at https://github.com/ay-lab/Soffritto.