miRBind2 enables sequence-only prediction of miRNA binding and transcript repression

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) regulate gene expression by guiding Argonaute proteins to partially complementary sites on target RNAs. While classical prediction methods rely on engineered features such as seed match categories, evolutionary conservation, and site context, recent advances in deep learning offer the potential to learn targeting rules directly from sequence. We developed a sequence-based deep learning model that improves miRNA target site prediction, and further validated the learned target site representations by extending the model to gene-level functional repression prediction.

We introduce miRBind2, a deep learning method for miRNA target site prediction that incorporates a novel pairwise nucleotide representation capturing all possible miRNA-target nucleotide interactions, with a CNN-based architecture. miRBind2 outperforms previous SotA models across four independent datasets from the debiased miRBench benchmark, while using 92% fewer parameters. We show that the convolutional features and weights learned by miRBind2 can be transferred to transcript-level prediction by extending the miRBind2 architecture and fine-tuning it on miRNA perturbation experiments. This miRBind2-3UTR model predicts gene repression from sequence alone. On a dataset of 50 549 miRNA-gene pairs, miRBind2-3UTR significantly outperforms TargetScan. These results show that deep models pretrained on target site data can capture regulatory signals and predict functional repression without requiring conventional engineered biological features.

Models and source code are freely available via GitHub (https://github.com/BioGeMT/miRBind_2.0). A publicly available web-tool for novel predictions and visualization is available at: (https://huggingface.co/spaces/dimostzim/BioGeMT-miRBind2).